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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."
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Do they have SCO's permission?
Shhh ! You're gonna wake up one of these 3 digits slashdot ID elders. And you know how they love to speak about good ol'time...
In return for the free content, all man pages will be required to incorporate ascii-art banner ads.
(Ahem.) I like man chiefly because the default (command-line) browser program doesn't suck quite so much. I'm sure there are technically superior ways to store documentation, but man is very readable. info, on the other hand, blows.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
$ man cp
"The UNIX man page system sucks. Use the info system instead."
so...
$ info cp
"The UNIX man page system sucks. Use the info system instead."
Seriously, besides GNU, who else favors info over man? I find the system difficult to navigate. For instance, when I was first learning {,ba}sh... damn, the bash info page sucks.
Does this mean no more cruel messages telling us to see the info pages?
Look out!
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.
Infuriate left and right
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
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.
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.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
Ach, you kids and your "brains." When I started we had to do all our thinkin' with just a few neurons at the top of our spinal chords. And we liked it! We loved it!
Brains? Luxury...
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.
-- Alastair
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.
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.
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.
(Since this is not very informative:)