Man Page Project Can Now Use Official POSIX Docs

Martin_Sturm writes "The IEEE consortium announces in a recent press release that it granted permission to the Linux Man Page Project to incorporate material from the official documentation on the POSIX standard. Obviously this is very good news for the Man Page project which now has access to a huge amount of good documentation. Until recently the project could not use this documentation due to copyright restricions."

Comments

Re:man, that's cool!

[Anonymous Coward]

Try reading info pages with "pinfo" instead of "info" - you'll like info pages much more when you've got a decent viewer =)

Re:Typical GNU utility man page...

[petabyte]

Umm, both my slackware and gentoo boxes have a full man page for cp. Apparently they're from the fileutils package.

I'd suggest everyone load up the funny-manpages and asr-manpages if you're bored.

man lart

Re:How useful is this?

[dietz]

I really don't know, this is not a troll, I didn't even know that there were POSIX man pages.

There are no POSIX man pages. But previously they weren't allowed to even quote the POSIX standard in their manpages. They had to rewrite it all and hope they didn't introduce any inaccuracies in their rewriting.

Now they can just quote the standard itself where they want to.

This is mostly important for programming documentation (e.g. "man 3 strerror")

Re:wtf? This wasn't automatic?

[vidarh]

Many standards organisations survive to a large extent on income generated by selling copies of the standards documents. It's only in recent years started becoming common for standards documents to be available free. Still, even now most ANSI and ISO standards for instance still costs money.

Re:Man & Info

[AJWM]

How would the 650 page GCC manual look as a man page?

Like it was done by someone who didn't understand the Unix documentation scheme.

The man pages were never the entire body of Unix documentation, just the first volume. The second volume consisted of longer, more tutorial or in depth documents for the programs that needed it. (Like some compilers, or awk, or [t]roff, etc.)

Way back in prehistory I worked with a port of Version 7 Unix (UTS) that came with a complete set of printed manuals -- the man pages were only half the documentation.

That said, info is lame, and commands that have no man page because they have info doubly so.

Re:bah!

[JoeBuck]

The format is not info but texinfo, which produces output in many forms: TeX (for typeset documents), HTML, as well as info; furthermore, the man pages for many GNU programs are now produced by automatic conversion from the info source.

Texinfo beats roff format for man pages because it supports structure and hyperlinks. XML (or SGML) formats are even better, but "man format" sucks. And I've written a lot of "man pages" in my career.

Release Notes (man-pages-1.65.Announce)

[An Anonymous Hero]

(Since this is not very informative:)

RELEASE
The Linux man page maintainer proudly announces. . .

man-pages-1.65.tar.gz - man pages for Linux

POSIX
This release is the first to contain the POSIX 1003.1-2003 man pages. The directories man0p, man1p, man3p contain descriptions of the headers, the utilities, and the functions documented in that standard.

Permission to distribute these POSIX man pages has just been obtained, and the pages in man0p, man1p, man3p were derived from the POSIX html pages by some silly conversion script. No doubt the result is still full of flaws, and all of this can be much improved. Corrections, scripts, etc. are welcome - aeb@<snip>.

In order to use this, put in {/usr/share/misc/}man.conf{ig} or so your favourite order of looking at these pages, for example,
MANSECT 1p:1:8:0p:3p:2:3:4:5:6:7:9:tcl:n:l:p:o
or set the MANSECT environment variable.

OTHER PAGES
The remaining pages are most of the section 2, 3, 4, 5, 7 man pages for Linux, and in addition section 1 man pages for the fileutils-4.0 utilities, and section 5 and 8 man pages for the timezone utilities.

[The latter were taken from ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzcode2001a.tar.gz.] [The section 3 man pages for the db routines have been taken from ftp://ftp.terra.net/pub/sleepycat/db.1.86.tar.gz.] [The rpc man pages were taken from the 4.4BSD-Lite CDROM.]

Differences from version 1.64:

POSIX pages were added

The man pages

chroot.2 clone.2 intro.2 mkdir.2 remap_file_pages.2

errno.3

sk98lin.4

elf.5 protocols.5 raw.7

are new or have been updated. Typographical or grammatical errors have been corrected in several other places.

Here is a breakdown of what this distribution contains:

Section 0p = POSIX headers
Section 1p = POSIX utilities
Section 3p = POSIX functions

Section 1 = user commands (intro, and pages not maintained by FSF)
Section 2 = system calls
Section 3 = libc calls
Section 4 = devices (e.g., hd, sd)
Section 5 = file formats and protocols (e.g., wtmp, /etc/passwd, nfs)
Section 6 = games (intro only)
Section 7 = conventions, macro packages, etc.
Section 8 = system administration (intro only)

Usually, there are no section 1, 6 and 8 man pages because these should be distributed with the binaries they are written for. Sometimes Section 9 is used for man pages describing parts of the kernel.

Note that only Section 2 is rather complete, but Section 3 contains several hundred man pages. If you want to write some man pages, please do so and mail them to aeb@<snip>.

The following people (listed in alphabetical order by first name) wrote, edited, or otherwise contributed to this project:

<snip>

Copyright information:

For the POSIX pages permission to distribute was given by IEEE and the Open Group, see POSIX-COPYRIGHT.

For the remaining pages, please note that these man pages are distributed under a variety of copyright licenses. Although these licenses permit free distribution of the nroff sources contained in this package, commercial distribution may impose other requirements (e.g., acknowledgement of copyright or inclusion of the raw nroff sources with the commercial distribution).
If you distribute these man pages commercially, it is your responsibility to figure out your obligations. (For many man pages, these obligations require you to distribute nroff sources with any pre-formatted man pages that you provide.) Each file that contains nroff source for a man page also contains the author(s) name, email address, and copyright notice.