Tuesday, March 15, 2016

man-pages-4.05 is released

I've released man-pages-4.05. 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, reviews, and comments from more than 70 contributors. The release includes changes to more than 400 man pages. Among the more significant changes in man-pages-4.05 are the following:

  • A new copy_file_range(2) page, contributed by kernel developer Anna Schumaker, documents the copy_file_range() system call added in Linux 4.5.
  • The personality(2) page has been greatly expanded, to add descriptions of personality domains.
  • The fmemopen(3) page has been split into two, with a new open_memstream(3) page documenting just the latter function. At the same time, the description of fmemopen(3) (which was completely rewritten in glibc 2.22) was substantially revised and enhanced. 
  • A new ntp_gettime(3) page documents ntp_gettime(3) and ntp_gettimex(3).
  • A new posix_spawn(3) page, cowritten long ago by Bill O Gallmeister and me, documents posix_spawn(3) and posix_spawnp(3).
  • A new lirc(4) page by Alec Leamas documents the lirc device driver.
  • The adjtimex(2) manual page has been substantially revised and adds documentation of the ntp_adjtime(3) library function.
  • The feature test macro (FTM) requirements in all manual pages have been updated, corrected, and in some cases simplified:
    • Where appropriate, requirements for the use of _DEFAULT_SOURCE (new in glibc 2.19) have been added.
    • The feature test macros _BSD_SOURCE and _SVID_SOURCE are now obsolete, and the man pages now indicate that these macros are only used with glibc 2.19 and earlier.
    • Since certain FTM values automatically imply that other FTMs will be set to certain values, the FTM descriptions in many pages have been simplified.
    • Mention of some obsolete FTMs (e.g., _POSIX_SOURCE and _XOPEN_SOURCE_EXTENDED) has been removed from the man pages.
    • The feature_test_macros(7) page has been updated in line with the above changes.