man-pages-fr-2.74.0 est sorti

Back in June 2005, a few months after I became the man-pages maintainer, Alain Portal took over the French translation, which had long been maintained by Christophe Blaess (author of Programmation Système en C sous Linux, a nice book on Linux system programming). At that time, the current French translation (1.58) was trailing the English original (2.03) by about 16 releases, and Alain was determined to catch up by creating one-to-one releases for each of the original English release tarballs. I tried to dissuade him from that course, arguing that it might be less work to simply jump forward to translating the current English version. Luckily, he did not listen to me. He proceeded with his plan, creating French translations that corresponded exactly with the original English releases. Along the way he reported countless formatting and wording errors, and many confused pieces of text in the original English pages, which I then corrected upstream.

87 releases later, Alain has caught up with the current English release: yesterday man-pages-fr-2.74.0 was released, and can be downloaded from the usual location. It's a wonderful achievement, and incredibly valuable for francophones all over the world -- thanks Alain!

man-pages-2.74 is released

I've uploaded man-pages-2.74, almost certainly the last release this year, into the release directory (or view the online pages).

Changes include many formatting fixes, and a description of an ugly bug in times(2).

man-pages-2.73 is released

Pádraig Brady prompted me to try to make the online pages look a bit better.
As a result I've uploaded man-pages-2.73 into the release directory, and uploaded a new version of the HTML pages. (The actual changes in man-pages-2.73 are quite small, and consist mainly of formatting fixes.)

man-pages-2.71 and man-pages-2.72 are released

I've uploaded man-pages-2.71 and man-pages-2.72 into the release directory (or view the online pages).

The most notable of the changes in man-pages-2.71 is the replacement of mdoc macros by man macros in 9 pages that used the former macros. This means that the only pages that still use mdoc macros are mdoc(7) and mdoc.samples(7).

Notable changes in man-pages-2.72 are a rewrite of the abort(3) man page and very many formatting fixes suggested by Alain Portal, maintainer of the French translation of man-pages.

Meanwhile, the timerfd saga goes on, after I tried using the draft timerfd_create(2) man page as a test spec.

man-pages-2.70 released

I've uploaded man-pages-2.70 into the release directory (or view the online pages). The changes in this release consist mainly of formatting and consistency fixes.

man-pages-2.69 released

I've uploaded man-pages-2.69 into the release directory. Among the changes are various fixes by J. Bruce Fields in the fcntl(2) page, many improvements and updates by Jeremy Kerr for spu_run(2), spu_create(2), and spufs(7), and many small fixes to various pages suggested by Alain Portal and Maxime Vaudequin, and whitespace fix-ups to improve the appearance of a large number of the POSIX (*.[013]p) pages.

man-pages website and mailing list

man-pages now has a website. The website includes information about reporting bugs and otherwise contributing to man-pages, and also contains the online pages from the latest release.

There is also a mailing list for discussions related to man-pages. The posting address is linux-man@vger.kernel.org. (You do not need to be subscribed to the list to post to it.) To subscribe to the list, send a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org, with the body:

subscribe linux-man

An archive of the messages to this list is available on gmane.

man-pages-2.68 released

Earlier this week I uploaded man-pages-2.68 into the release directory. Among the changes are a new _syscall(2) page, and substantially written intro(2) and intro(3) pages.

man-pages-2.67 released

Yesterday I uploaded man-pages-2.67 into the release directory. The changes in this release are primarily formatting fixes, and the addition of a PROLOG section to the 1p and 3p (POSIX) pages giving a clear indication that these are POSIX man pages (so as to prevent readers wrongly understanding that they are looking at a description of Linux behavior).

Work in progress

A few days ago, I released man-pages-2.66, which included the page that David Chinner wrote for fallocate(2), a new system call in Linux 2.6.23. Work on man-pages-2.67 is done, and I'll upload it soon; meanwhile, I'm working on man-pages-2.68, and also working on a website for man-pages.

Getting started

So this is the first of a series of irregular posts about my work on the Linux man-pages project, and related topics, like kernel-userland API testing and API design review. (I did a talk on the latter topics at LinuxConf Europe 2007, and Jon Corbet was kind enough to do a sympathetic write-up on lwn.net. I also covered some of the same ground at the 2007 Linux kernel summit.)