man-pages is now supported

Last month I started on what is, for the moment, my dream job: man-pages finally has a paid, full-time maintainer, thanks to a fellowship from the Linux Foundation. For the foreseeable future, that means I'll be working on:

• Documenting every new Linux kernel-userland (and glibc) API, and every API change, that is released into the mainline kernel, ideally before actual release. (That's the ideal, but there's a quite a backlog, so I'm not going to achieve the ideal immediately.)


• Testing new APIs, again ideally before they are released into the mainline kernel, and probably doing some light bug fixing while I'm at it.


• Design review of new kernel-userland APIs.


• And of course accepting patches and dealing with bug reports for existing man pages.

Other than that, I'll be helping out with in-kernel documentation (the /Documentation directory) by providing editorial, review, and possibly other assistance.

When I find time, I'll try to post a longer job description (but have a look here in the meantime). In the meantime, I'm looking forward to going to the Linux Plumbers Conference, September 17-19, in Portland, OR, USA, where there is currently a planned track on kernel-userland APIs.

man-pages-2.80 and man-pages-fr-2.80.0 are released

The Linux man-pages maintainer, Michael Kerrisk, and the maintainer of the French translation of man-pages, Alain Portal, proudly announce the simultaneous release of man-pages-2.80 in English original and French translation.

The English version can be downloaded from the usual release directory (or viewed online at the usual location).

The French translation can be downloaded from http://manpagesfr.free.fr/download.html, or viewed online at http://manpagesfr.free.fr/consulter.html.

There is long list of changes in man-pages-2.80. Among the more notable changes are the following:

• A new random_r(3) page describes random_r(3), srandom_r(3), initstate_r(3), and setstate_r(3), the reentrant equivalents of random(3), srandom(3), initstate(3), and setstate(3).
• getpriority(2) adds text describing the punchier effect of nice values since kernel 2.6.23.
• mmap(2) describes improvements for the support of MAP_POPULATE in kernel 2.6.23.
• sched_setscheduler(2) adds a description of the SCHED_IDLE policy, new in 2.6.23.
• futimes(3) adds a description of lutimes(3), which was added in glibc 2.6
• credentials(7) adds some text describing how NPTL maintains the same UIDs and GIDs for all threads in a process, even though the Linux kernel allows each thread to have distinct credentials.
• inotify(7) documents the SIGIO support that was added for inotify in kernel 2.6.25.
• standards(7) adds a description of the upcoming POSIX.1 revision.
• A large number of consistency and formatting fix-ups were made to many pages.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

man-pages-2.79 is released

I've uploaded man-pages-2.79 into the release directory (or view the online pages).

Notable changes in man-pages-2.79 are:

• a new page describing the timerfd API (timerfd_create(2), timerfd_settime(2), timerfd_gettime(2)), which is new in kernel 2.6.25
  
• various additions and improvements to the syslog(2) page (thanks in part to Jeremy Kerr)
  
• many clarifications and additions to the epoll.7 page (with help from Davide Libenzi and Chris Heath)
  

man-pages-2.78 is released

I've uploaded man-pages-2.78 into the release directory (or view the online pages).

Notable changes in man-pages-2.78 are new pages describing the eventfd(2) and signalfd(2) system calls, and a substantial addition to open(2) by Greg Banks describing the semantics and use of O_DIRECT.

man-pages-2.77 is released

I've uploaded man-pages-2.77 into the release directory (or view the online version, which now includes facilities for searching the pages).

Look here for a list of changes in this release.

man-pages-2.76 is released

I've uploaded man-pages-2.76 into the release directory (or view the online pages).

Changes include rewrites of (parts of) the gettid(2), pipe(2), and umask(2) pages.

man-pages-2.75 and man-pages-fr-2.75.0 are released

The Linux man-pages maintainer, Michael Kerrisk, and the maintainer of the French translation of man-pages, Alain Portal, proudly announce the simultaneous release of man-pages-2.75 in English original and French translation.

The English version can be downloaded from the usual release directory (or view the online pages).

The French translation can be downloaded from http://manpagesfr.free.fr/download.html. The translated French pages are viewable online, along with some translated man pages from other projects, at http://manpagesfr.free.fr/consulter.html. Comments and suggestions for the French translation can be sent to manpagesfr AT free DOT fr.

A huge thanks to Alain, who has over the last two and a half years made a terrific effort to bring the French translation fully up to date with the English original.

man-pages-fr-2.74.0 est sorti

Back in June 2005, a few months after I became the man-pages maintainer, Alain Portal took over the French translation, which had long been maintained by Christophe Blaess (author of Programmation Système en C sous Linux, a nice book on Linux system programming). At that time, the current French translation (1.58) was trailing the English original (2.03) by about 16 releases, and Alain was determined to catch up by creating one-to-one releases for each of the original English release tarballs. I tried to dissuade him from that course, arguing that it might be less work to simply jump forward to translating the current English version. Luckily, he did not listen to me. He proceeded with his plan, creating French translations that corresponded exactly with the original English releases. Along the way he reported countless formatting and wording errors, and many confused pieces of text in the original English pages, which I then corrected upstream.

87 releases later, Alain has caught up with the current English release: yesterday man-pages-fr-2.74.0 was released, and can be downloaded from the usual location. It's a wonderful achievement, and incredibly valuable for francophones all over the world -- thanks Alain!

man-pages-2.74 is released

I've uploaded man-pages-2.74, almost certainly the last release this year, into the release directory (or view the online pages).

Changes include many formatting fixes, and a description of an ugly bug in times(2).

man-pages-2.73 is released

Pádraig Brady prompted me to try to make the online pages look a bit better.
As a result I've uploaded man-pages-2.73 into the release directory, and uploaded a new version of the HTML pages. (The actual changes in man-pages-2.73 are quite small, and consist mainly of formatting fixes.)

man-pages-2.71 and man-pages-2.72 are released

I've uploaded man-pages-2.71 and man-pages-2.72 into the release directory (or view the online pages).

The most notable of the changes in man-pages-2.71 is the replacement of mdoc macros by man macros in 9 pages that used the former macros. This means that the only pages that still use mdoc macros are mdoc(7) and mdoc.samples(7).

Notable changes in man-pages-2.72 are a rewrite of the abort(3) man page and very many formatting fixes suggested by Alain Portal, maintainer of the French translation of man-pages.

Meanwhile, the timerfd saga goes on, after I tried using the draft timerfd_create(2) man page as a test spec.

man-pages-2.70 released

I've uploaded man-pages-2.70 into the release directory (or view the online pages). The changes in this release consist mainly of formatting and consistency fixes.

man-pages-2.69 released

I've uploaded man-pages-2.69 into the release directory. Among the changes are various fixes by J. Bruce Fields in the fcntl(2) page, many improvements and updates by Jeremy Kerr for spu_run(2), spu_create(2), and spufs(7), and many small fixes to various pages suggested by Alain Portal and Maxime Vaudequin, and whitespace fix-ups to improve the appearance of a large number of the POSIX (*.[013]p) pages.

man-pages website and mailing list

man-pages now has a website. The website includes information about reporting bugs and otherwise contributing to man-pages, and also contains the online pages from the latest release.

There is also a mailing list for discussions related to man-pages. The posting address is linux-man@vger.kernel.org. (You do not need to be subscribed to the list to post to it.) To subscribe to the list, send a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org, with the body:

subscribe linux-man

An archive of the messages to this list is available on gmane.

man-pages-2.68 released

Earlier this week I uploaded man-pages-2.68 into the release directory. Among the changes are a new _syscall(2) page, and substantially written intro(2) and intro(3) pages.