8 Jan
2024
8 Jan
'24
6:20 a.m.
Hi Brian,
Since this is my work, and it was the first PDF
produced from the troff
sources. So let me set the stage, and this should answer some of the
issues you and others have with my work. This was 25 years ago.
Thank you for this very detailed account! It certainly helps clear
the air, and helps people like me (who weren't there at the time)
understand this history a little better.
So I went about to produce one. It was so much harder
than anticipated.
I spent a lot of my spare time doing it, it took me months to complete.
Someone all ready posted my notes on how I made it in an earlier message.
Once I got it to a state where I was happy with it, I stopped.
I am doing something similar with 4.3BSD manuals. When I started on
this quest in 2004, I didn't have any reference for how the original
looked, I was flying blind, and the draft I produced that year was so
poor (by my own judgment) that I never took it further. In 2010 I was
able to score a real paper copy (relic) of 4.3BSD Usenix print, I made
some improvements to my troff, but then I had to put it down and
switch to other projects. I picked it up again in 2012, got URM and
PRM books done (these are easy, man pages only, 4.3BSD equiv of Vol1),
was working on USD book (first big book of supplementary docs, has all
docs for troff suite), but then again I got switched to a different
(and very big) project, the one in my current domain name.
I am revisiting it now, and I was _*very*_ pleased when I found
published scans on archive.org, by Erica Fischer, of all Usenix books
from *both* 4.2BSD and 4.3BSD sets, uploaded in 2017. Now I don't
have to feel guilty about "hoarding" my treasured physical copy of the
original Usenix 4.3BSD print! I still desire to finish my PostScript
reprint of all 6 4.3BSD books: the historical ones I got are very
fragile, the plastic binding combs already got several broken teeth,
and given that I like to use 4.3BSD "for real", I would really love to
have physical reference books on my bookshelf that aren't fragile and
can take abuse - hence the desire for a new physical print. Plus the
feel-good of publishing PostScript files, one perfectly DSC-conforming
PS file for each book, that anyone in the community can do with as they
please, plus full recipes for recreating them...
If someone desires a more perfectionist PostScript reprint of the V7
manual, let's revisit this discussion in another few weeks when I put
out my current reprints of 4.3BSD URM, USD and PRM - it will be easier
to refer to those when discussing possible ideas for V7.
It was made under Solaris 2.6, on an Ultra 2
("Pulsar"), using the troff, tbl,
eqn, pic, refer and macros as supplied by Sun at that time, and NOT any GNU
ones. Why? These were the versions written by AT&T that Sun got directly from
them during their SVR4 collaboration. I used the PostScript output option to
troff (which obviously did not exist in 1979).
You did the right thing: the version you used certainly feels much more
"right" than anything from GNU.
That code to produce PostScript
outout, had a high probability of being written by the graphics group run by
Nils-Peter Nelson in Russ Archer's Murray Hill Computer Center (department
45268).
So it is a different ditroff-to-PS chain than psdit from Adobe
Transcript? I am not too familiar with the latter, as I ended up
writing my own troff (derived from V7 version, just published) that
emits PS directly, but it is my understanding that Back In The Day
most people used psdit for this type of workflow.
I did have a volume 2A that also had the correct 7th
Edition C Reference
Manual
in it. The one you get in my 1988 PDF is from the 6th Edition, notice it is
the old =+ syntax and not the += one. Dennis said that not even Lucent could
provide that as a free PDF, as it was a published book by Prentice-Hall. I
was asked to destroy all PDFs that had that version in it.
Ouch, until you pointed it out in this ML post, I hadn't even noticed
that the C Reference Manual doc is "wrong" in your PDF version! But
here comes the really important question: if you once had a PDF reprint
with the "right" version of this doc, where did you get the troff
source for it? This is the source that was actually censored from the
V7 tape:
https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/doc/cman
I don't have this problem for my 4.3BSD reprint: the source for 4.3BSD
version of this doc is included on the tape; the corresponding SCCS
log begins with "document received from AT&T", checked in on 86/05/14,
and then revised by BSD people into what they wanted printed in their
version of the manual. But if someone wishes to do a *proper* reprint
of the V7 manual (or 4.2BSD, where this doc and many others were
literally unchanged duplications from V7 master at the plate level),
we need the troff source for the V7 version of this doc.
If this source is totally lost, we as in community can probably do an
OCR from a surviving scan (for example, the one in 4.2BSD PSD book)
and then painstakingly produce a new troff source that would format
into an exact replica - but if there is a leaked copy of the original
source somewhere, it would certainly make our job way easier.
Larry McVoy asked me for my modified files to make the
PDFs too, in 1999 or
2000, for bitkeeper or bitsavers. But since I was not allowed to share them
and I had moved companies, I had lost them. I thought I had saved a copy but
I could no longer find it. I asked Dennis if he still had them, he did not.
This work is truly lost.
Aside from the unresolved issue of "cman" document, we as in community
can produce an even better work if we so wish. I am deferring a more
detailed discussion until I put out my 4.3BSD PS reprint, so I can
point to it as a reference for how I like to do things, and maybe by
then we'll have some clarity on what happened to V7 "cman" troff source.
M~