Wednesday, May 22, 2013

More man pages now rendered at man7.org

As detailed in this blog post, I've expanded the set of man pages rendered in HTML at http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/ to include pages in addition to those provided by the man-pages project. This change has several purposes. One main purpose is to provide a up-to-date and regularly updated HTML renderings of these man pages. (Most online man page renderings are out-of-date to some extent--in some cases, extremely out of date.) The other main purpose is to provide information on where to report bugs in each man page. To this end, each HTML rendering includes a COLOPHON that describes the origin of the page, notes the date when it was extracted, and provides information on where to report bugs in the page. (The man-pages project has already done this since December 2007, with the result that many more man page bugs are nowadays reported.)

Currently, man pages from nearly 40 projects are rendered, raising the number of pages rendered at man7.org from around 950 to around 1750. The projects that I have so far included have a bias that matches my interests: man-pages, projects related to low-level C and system programming (e.g., the ACL and extended attribute libraries), toolchain projects (e.g., gcc, gdb, Git, coreutils, binutils, util-linux), and other relevant tools (kmod, strace, ltrace, procps, expect) and tools relevant to manual pages (e.g., groff, man-db). The full list of projects and the corresponding man pages that are rendered can be found in the man pages by project index. I'm open to adding further projects to the rendered set, if they seem relevant. If you think there is a project that should be added, take a look at this blog post.