Tuesday, December 22, 2020

man-pages-5.10 is released

Starting with this release, Alejandro (Alex) Colomar has joined me as project comaintainer, and we've released man-pages-5.10. 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 around 25 contributors. The release includes just over 150 commits that changed around 140 pages.

The most notable of the changes in man-pages-5.10 are the following:

  • I've added documentation of the faccessat2() system call (new in Linux 5.10) to the access(2) manual page.
  •  I've added a new subsection to the signal(7) manual page that provides a "big picture" of what happens when a signal handler is executed.

Sunday, November 1, 2020

man-pages-5.09 is released

I've released man-pages-5.09. 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 40 contributors. The release includes more than 500 commits that changed nearly 600 pages. Nine new pages were added in this release.

The most notable of the changes in man-pages-5.09 are the following:

  • Alejandro Colomar created a very useful new page, system_data_types(7), which has summary information about many commonly used system data types (currently about 45 types). In addition, the pages has links for each type, so that now it is possible to type a command such as man timespec to to get information about that type, the header files that define it, and the primary APIs that use the type.
  • Alejandro also did a lot of work to split the former queue(3) page, which was a rather unwieldy description of dozen of APIs, into a number of smaller pages, each of which describes a subset of related APIs. The new pages are circleq(3), list(3), slist(3), stailq(3), and tailq(3). The now rather smaller queue(3) page, which has essentially become a summary of the APIs, has migrated to become queue(7).
  • In addition, Alejandro made a large number of consistency fixes across many pages, especially in the code examples, where many pieces of C code were made more correct.
  • I added a new pthread_attr_setsigmask_np(3) page, documenting the pthread_attr_setsigmask_np(3) and pthread_attr_getsigmask_np(3) functions that were added in glibc 2.32.
  • A new kernel_lockdown(7) page, written by David Howells with improvements from Heinrich Schuchardt, describes the Kernel Lockdown feature that was merged in Linux 5.4.
  • I added descriptions of the sigabbrev_np() and sigdescr_np() functions (new in glibc 2.32) to the strsignal(3) page.
  • I added descriptions of the strerrorname_np() and strerrordesc_np() functions (also new in glibc 2.32) to the strerror(3) manual page.
As is probably clear, Alejandro Colomar owns this release. With 265 commits, he was by some margin the top contributor, and I'm very happy to report that he beat me into second place as a contributor to this release (something that happened only once before since I became maintainer).

Thursday, August 13, 2020

man-pages-5.08 is released

I've released man-pages-5.08. 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 30 contributors. The release includes more than 190 commits that change around 340 pages.

The most notable of the changes in man-pages-5.08 are the following:

  • Dave Martin added documentation of some arm64-specific prctl() operations to the prctl(2) manual page.
  • Aleksa Sarai added some documentation of magic links to the symlink(7) page.
  • I've added documentation on the use of PID file descriptors with setns() to the setns(2) page.
  • I've made various typographical fixes to many manual pages so that certain characters render better on the terminal or in PDF-format, or both.

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

man-pages-5.07 is released

I've released man-pages-5.07. 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 80 contributors. The release includes more than 380 commits that change more than 380 pages. One new page was added in this release, and one page was removed.

The most notable of the changes in man-pages-5.07 are the following:

  • A new ioctl_fslabel(2) page, written by Eric Sandeen, adds documentation of ioctl() operations for getting and setting filesystem labels.
  • The ioctl_list(2) page has been removed. This page was first added more than 20 years ago, and provided a minimal amount of information about the ioctl() operations available at that time. Since that time it has seen hardly any updates, and is by now very much out of date. The fact that I received few complaints about the page is indicative that no-one really cares about its contents, and it seems appropriate to remove it.
  • The adjtimex(2) page adds documentation of the clock_adjtime() system call; thanks to Arnd Bergmann.
  • Many updates to the fanotify manual pages, thanks to Amir Goldstein.

Sunday, April 12, 2020

man-pages-5.06 is released

I've released man-pages-5.06. 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 39 contributors. The release includes more than 250 commits that change more than 120 pages. Three new pages were added in this release.

The most notable of the changes in man-pages-5.06 are the following:

  • A new openat2(2) manual page, written by Aleksa Sarai, documents the system call of the same name that was added in Linux 5.6.
  • A new pidfd_getfd(2) page, written by me, documents the system call of the same name that was added in Linux 5.6.
  • A new time_namespaces(7) page, written by me, documents time namespaces, which were added in Linux 5.6.
  • Many details were added and improved in the clock_getres(2) page.
  • I have substantially revised the select(2) and select_tut(2)In the process, much information that was duplicated across both pages has been consolidated into the select(2) page. Existing text in select(2) was also substantially rewritten and restructured.
  • I have revised and trimmed the sysvipc(7) to be just a summary of the System V IPC APIs. Various details that formerly were in this page have been moved to relevant pages in section 2.
  • I've added example programs to several pages: clock_getres(2), poll(2), semget(2), shmop(2), shm_open(3), and strcmp(3).

Sunday, February 9, 2020

man-pages-5.05 is released

I've released man-pages-5.05. 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 40 contributors. The release includes approximately 110 commits that change around 50 pages.