Tuesday, March 31, 2015

man-pages-3.82 is released

I've released man-pages-3.82. 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.

As well as a large number of minor fixes to more than 80 man pages, the more significant changes in man-pages-3.82 include the following:

  • A new nptl(7) page documents some of the specifics of the NPTL (Native POSIX Thread Library) implementation provided by glibc. In addition, many man pages for signal-related system calls added some details on where the glibc NPTL wrapper functions implement semantics that differ from the the underlying bare system call.
  • A large number of changes were made in the user_namespaces(7) page, including the addition of documentation for the /proc/PID/setgroups file that was added in Linux 3.19 in order to fix a security problem related to the use of setgroups(2) inside user namespaces.

Monday, March 2, 2015

man-pages-3.81 is released

I've released man-pages-3.81. 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.

The changes in man-pages-3.81 relate exclusively to the (glibc) thread-safety markings in various man pages. More than 400 patches, mainly by Ma Shimiao and Peng Haitao of Fujitsu brought the following changes:

  • Thread-safety information has been added to many more pages.
  • The thread-safety notation in man-pages has been made consistent with the notation used in the GNU C Library Manual.
  • Thread-safety information in man-pages has been checked for consistency with the same information in the GNU C Library Manual. In some cases, this has resulted in refinements to the markings in man-pages.
  • The thread-safety information in man-pages has been been converted from a plain text layout to a tabular layout, for ease of reading.
By now, thanks mainly to the work of Peng Haitao and Ma Shimiao, nearly 400 of the (around 980) pages in man-pages carry thread-safety information.

In addition, a new attributes(7) man page, based on text supplied by Alexandre Oliva (who was responsible for adding thread-safety information to the GNU C Library manual) provides an overview of the thread-safety concepts documented in man-pages, and a description of the notation used in man-pages to describe the thread safety of functions. (Thanks also to Carlos O'Donell for helping us to obtain the permissions needed so that man-pages could recycle this text from the GNU C Library manual.)