Wednesday, March 6, 2019

man-pages-5.00 is released

I've released man-pages-5.00. 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 130 contributors. The release is rather larger than average, since it has been nearly a year since the last release. The release includes more than 600 commits that changed nearly 400 pages. In addition, 3 new manual pages were added.

Among the more significant changes in man-pages-5.,00 are the following:

  • A new page, bpf-helpers(7), documents the helper functions that the kernel provide for eBPF programs to call. This page is autogenerated from kernel files, and was brought to life in the man-pages project by Quentin Monnet.
  • Various updates to the perf_event_open(2) page by Vince Weaver.
  • A new s390_guarded_storage(2) page by Eugene Syromyatnikov documents the s390-specific system call of the same name.
  • The addition of many formerly absent architecture-specific system calls in the table of system calls shown syscalls(2).
  • A significant overhaul of the lirc4) page by Sean Young.
  • Many additions to the proc(5) page.
  • Much of the detail on socket address families in the rather overloaded socket(2) page has now been moved to a new address_families(7) page.
  • A large number of additions, mostly by me, in the capabilities(7) page.
  • Many improvements, all by me, in the discussion of ancillary data in the unix(7) page.
In addition, two pages have been removed in this release after encouragement from Ingo Schwarze: mdoc(7) and mdoc.samples(7). As the commit message notes, groff_mdoc(7) from the groff project provides a better equivalent of mdoc.samples(7) and the mandoc project provides a better mdoc(7). And nowadays, there are virtually no pages in man-pages that use mdoc markup.

Again special thanks to Eugene Syromyatnikov, who contributed nearly 30 patches to this release!

3 comments:

Unknown said...

This is encouraging. Sometimes I thought man pages have become an afterthought on GNU/Linux (but never got into doing something against that myself much...)
Thank you!

Santhosh N said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Santhosh N said...

Good to know about the man page of bpf-helpers. The link to bpf-helpers does not point to the right page. Please change that.