Alex Colomar and I have released released man-pages-5.11. 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 40 contributors. A number of wide-ranging global edits by Alex and me have resulted in one of the largest releases since I became involved with man-pages some 20 years ago. The release includes around 480 commits that changed around 950 (more than 90% of the) manual pages. The diff runs to more than 50k lines (which makes it the third largest release measured by lines changed).
The most notable of the changes in man-pages-5.11 are the following:
- A new close_range(2) page, written by Stephen Kitt and me, documents the close_range() system call that was added in Linux 5.9.
- A new process_madvise(2) page, written by Suren Baghdasaryan and Minchan Kim, documents the process_madvise() system call that was added in Linux 5.10.
- Alex Colomar made a long overdue global fix to the manual pages, adding the restrict keyword to function signatures in the SYNOPSIS of all manual pages that required it. This resulted in changes to around 135 pages!
- Alex Colomar removed the <sys/types.h> header file from the SYNOPSIS of many pages where that header is no longer required. (The standard removed such requirements 20+ years ago.)
- Willem de Bruijn added documentation of the epoll_pwait2() system call (new in Linux 5.11) to the epoll_wait(2) page.
- Gabriel Krisman Bertazi added documentation of the Syscall User Dispatch mechanism to the prctl(2) page.
- I added documentation of the mallinfo2() function (new in glibc 2.33) to the mallinfo(3) page.
- I have made global edits to improve consistency and layout in the SYNOPSIS (feature test macros), RETURN VALUE, and ATTRIBUTES in a large number of pages. A summary of many of these changes has been captured in the new FORMATTING AND WORDING CONVENTIONS section in man-pages(7).
- A new fileno(3) manual page has been created by extracting content formerly in the ferror(3) page. This change reflects the fact that ferror() is in various ways different from the other functions documented in ferror(3).
