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).

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