Tuesday, June 17, 2008

man-pages-3.00 is released

I've uploaded man-pages-3.00 into the release directory (or view the online pages). Notable changes in man-pages-3.00 are:

  • The POSIX man pages (man pages sections 0p, 1p, 3p) are now split out into a separate package, which can be downloaded here. This makes sense because the POSIX pages are logically separate: they are copies of specifications from the POSIX.1 standard (to be precise, we are currently redistributing pages from the 2003 Technical Corrigendum 1), that we have kindly been given permission to publish by the IEEE and The Open Group. Furthermore, the POSIX pages are only updated rarely (e.g., occasional formatting fixes, and periodic updates when a new version of the standard is released, such as the revision due to appear later this year), so there is no need to redistribute them with each release of man-pages.

  • After Stuart Brady noted that the quotes around single-quoted characters were not formatted well in UTF-8 output, I've globally replaced the characters used in the source files for quoting in man-pages in order to try and produce better formatted output for both ASCII and UTF-8 xterms, and also to bring greater consistency in general to the use of single and double quotes in the pages. This may not be the final word on the subject, but at least things should be somewhat improved.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is there a git tree for the manpages and where can I send patches?

Thanks,

-- andreas

Michael Kerrisk said...

No git tree (yet). Info about patches here: http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/patches.html