Not all Linux man pages are part of the man-pages set. In particular, most Section 1, 6, and 8 pages come as part of some other package, and many pages in Sections 3, 4, and 5 also come from other packages. The easiest way to determine which pages are part of the man-pages package is to download the latest version, and see if the page is present, or look in the online pages.
Alternatively, since release 2.69, all pages that are part of the man-pages package contain a COLOPHON section at the end of the page which explicitly notes that the page is part of man-pages and notes the version of man-pages in which the page occurs.
If you want to submit a patch for a man page that comes from another source, then you need to work out where the page comes from (i.e., which package) and who the maintainer of that page is. The way to do this depends on your distribution.
On an RPM-based distribution (e.g., SUSE, Red Hat, Mandriva), you can do the following to find out which package owns a particular file. For example, suppose we want to find out who maintains the md(4) man page:
$ man -w md
/usr/share/man/man4/md.4.gz
$ rpm -qf /usr/share/man/man4/md.4.gz
mdadm-2.5.3-17
We then have to find who maintains the mdadm package. A web search might help answer the question, or if you install the mdadm source package, there will probably be a file (typically named "README", "MAINTAINERS", ANNOUNCE", etc.) that will identify the maintainer.
On a Debian-based distribution (e.g., Debian, Knoppix, Ubuntu) you can do the following:
$ man -w fstab
/usr/share/man/man5/fstab.5.gz
$ dpkg -S /usr/share/man/man5/fstab.5.gz
mount: /usr/share/man/man5/fstab.5.gz
$ dpkg -p mount | grep Maintainer
Maintainer: LaMont Jones
Note: this gives you the Debian maintainer of the package in question,
which is a good address to report to,
since many packages and man pages are modified by Debian.
The maintainer of the original package
can usually be found in a README in
/usr/share/doc/
On Gentoo, we can use the equery belongs command to do similar:
$ equery belongs $(man -w md)
FIXME: fill in the details for Gentoo here.
(FIXME: add instructions for doing the equivalent of the above on distributions that use other schemes.)