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Man Page Project Can Now Use Official POSIX Docs

Posted by timothy on from the now-they-should-say-that-sco-cannot dept.

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."

11 of 229 comments (clear)

  1. No more see info? by zsau · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Does this mean no more cruel messages telling us to see the info pages?

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  2. How useful is this? by A+nonymous+Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Most man pages have long since been written from scratch for Linux. It would seem that any man pages still missing must be pretty rarely used, or for obsolete commands.

    There are differences between UNIXes and Linux distributions and BSD distributions. What do the POSIX man pages document, and is it more trouble than it is worth to use them as a basis for Linux man pages?

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

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  3. Has anyone here tried to write man pages? by Pyromage · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I see a lot of people bitching about how info sucks. Well, you know what? Maybe it does. But have you actually tried to write a man page?

    The syntax for roff just sucks. Info, on the other hand, is a fairly reasonable way to write documentation.

  4. wtf? This wasn't automatic? by visualight · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The most interesting point of this story is that the entire planet wasn't given permission to reprint the posix standard from day one. It's a standard isn't it?

    Isn't promoting standards one of the main reasons for the IEEE consortium's existance? How do you promote standards by not allowing anyone to reprint them?

    And the Linux Man Page Project expresses how grateful they feel. Whatever.

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    1. Re:wtf? This wasn't automatic? by CRCulver · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Standards, when published in print, are often sold for a heck of a lot of money. Take for instance the Unicode standard. It's an open standard, and quite important for internationalisation in our digital age, but you'll pay $74 to get it. When Linus was developing Linux, he had to get his POSIX information through Minix because it was too expensive to go right to POSIX.

  5. Re:man, that's cool! by GammaTau · · Score: 2, Interesting

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

    Yeah, pinfo is definitely better than the default info viewer. The only problem with pinfo is that it's not really standard. If I log on to a system I'm not familiar with (and then I often really _need_ documentation), I can't be sure if "pinfo foo" will work whereas "man foo" will work with almost 100% certainity.

    Because it is pretty much guaranteed that man pages can be read on every system without any viewer brain damage, it also leads to a situation where many people write only man pages and additional documentation in other formats (like plain text or HTML). I know that info can view man pages when info pages are not found but I rarely bother. I just use "man foo" and if that doesn't give what I'm searching for, then check /usr/share/doc or search the web.

  6. SCO relevancy? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Maybe this screws SCO and their hope to cash in on #DEFINE's?

  7. XSLT to generate man pages by KidSock · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The syntax for roff just sucks.

    Try using XSLT to generate troff. The CStyleX package will let you generate concise troff macros for GNU style C programming interface man pages (just like the screenshot on this page):

    http://www.ioplex.com/~miallen/cstylex/

    Actually the best part is that this will also generate HTML from the same source XML. And nothing prevents you from generting PostScript in the future or just about anything else for that matter. IOW you write XML run make and get man pages and HTML.

    PS: The package hasn't been updated in a while. The latest man.xsl and ref.xsl transforms are in the libmba package cited on the page referenced.

  8. POSIX standard onlin by fredex · · Score: 2, Interesting
    The article says:
    Another was the recent decision to make the POSIX standard freely available on the Internet.
    but where are they "freely" available? I've just scored both ieee and open group websites and the best I can find is some PDF documents at prices beginning around $105 and going up. Not what I call freely available.
  9. Grumpy middle-aged man wakes up by JoeBuck · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Sorry, four digits. But then, I did use the Arpanet before the Jan 1982 switchover to TCP/IP, so I am damn old.

    Today's man pages look almost the same as 1981 man pages from Bell Labs, so you haven't missed much by being young.

  10. Re:Man pages are evil... by jrockway · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Try M-x woman in emacs.

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