Saturday, August 8, 2015

man-pages-4.02 is released

I've released man-pages-4.02. The release tarball is available on kernel.org. The browsable online pages can be found on man7.org. The Git repository for man-pages is available on kernel.org.

This release resulted from patches, bug reports,and  comments from around 15 contributors. As well as a large number of minor fixes to nearly 400 man pages, the more significant changes in man-pages-4.02 include the following:

  • A new dlinfo(3) page documents the library function of the same name.
  • The dlopen(3) page, which, in a single page, documented rather too many functions in the dlopen API, has been split into several smaller pages: dlopen(3), dlerror(3), dladdr(3), and dlsym(3).
  • Documentation of the dladdr1(3) library function has been added to the (new) dladdr(3) man page.
  • Documentation of the dlmopen(3) library function has been added to the dlopen(3) man page. In the process of writing this documentation, Carlos O'Donnel and I realized that the API has essentially been unusably broken since its first appearance in glibc 2.3.4 (somewhat more than 10 years ago!), as described in the BUGS section of the man page--yet another lesson in the consequences of adding an API without documentation or a clear specification of expected behavior. Together, we're working on fixing the interface, which is to say that we've been trying to determine what would be sane expected behavior, which I've been documenting and testing against against the current Solaris behavior while Carlos does the heavy lifting to fix the glibc dlmopen(3) implementation. With luck, things will be fixed in glibc 2.23 (which should be released in early 2016). 
  • Daniel Borkmann has made a number of updates to the bpf(2) page that was added in the last man-pages release.