Keeping man pages up-to-date between Go releases
================================================

A new Go release naturally comes with updated (and new) documentation,
and it is important to keep at least existing man pages up-to-date so as
not to present outdated or even incorrect information to the end users.

To get an overview of the changes with Git:

    git diff upstream/1.18..upstream/1.19 src/cmd/go/alldocs.go

(optionally, add "-w" flag to ignore whitespaces when necessary.)

I also use something like the following quick-and-dirty commands to
manually check for changes in existing man pages (non-comprehensive):

    oldver=1.18
    newver=1.19
    for manpage in man/go-*.?; do
        topic=$(echo $manpage | sed 's/^man\/go-//; s/\.[1-8]$//')
        echo -e "\n$manpage ======================================\n"
        for ver in $oldver $newver; do
            /usr/lib/go-$ver/bin/go help $topic &> /tmp/$ver-go-$topic
        done
        colordiff -u /tmp/$oldver-go-$topic /tmp/$newver-go-$topic
    done | less -R

I then inspect the output, copy-and-paste the changes, and replace
single quotes to \(oq or \(cq, prepend a backslash before a hyphen, etc.
where necessary.

Note that many "go help" commands and topics were added over the years
and are missing man pages, such as:

 * go help generate
 * go help mod download
 * go help buildconstraints
 * ...

However, given how labour-intensive this process is, and not knowing how to
automate such man page updates, I am personally avoiding the creation of
any more new man pages due to lack of time and energy.

That said, if you are interested, please feel free to contribute!  :-)
Thank you!

 -- Anthony Fok <foka@debian.org>  Sat, 06 Aug 2022 12:50:00 -0600