20 Sep
2023
20 Sep
'23
7:26 a.m.
I'd start with groff.
So I'm a little off topic but if people wanted to work on that, I'd be
up for that project. It's not as big as what you are saying but it's
pretty big, I think we just start with something, see if we can get
debian/ubuntu to pick it up, lather, rinse repeat. In fact if we
just get the groff project to pick up our stuff, all the distros will
get that eventually.
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Larry McVoy Retired to fishing http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat
That's an excellent point, the beauty of UNIX being a granular system is that such an
effort wouldn't need to be a "start at page 1 and finish at page whatever",
but could be done piecemeal. Groff would also be a great candidate due to the
preponderance of supporting secondary papers, like the NROFF/TROFF manual, different macro
definitions, etc. That does then get into the prospect of the secondary papers too,
likewise excellent references to this day on a number of subjects that I personally would
love to have modernized versions of.
Well if anyone catches wind of such a project kicking off in some way elsewhere, know that
I'm certainly interested in what I can contribute. What my work towards this
eventual goal will probably continue to look like for now though is just doing my diff
analysis of manual versions, as one of my principle goals there was to identify the
apparent last common ancestor of Research, PWB, and BSD lineages, at least as far as
documentation is concerned. Common sense would just say research V7 but there are little
tidbits here and there between V6 and V7 that don't show up in other places, just
tiny little nuanced things for the most part. I haven't done this part of the
analysis at all but a causal glance at a 32V manual diffed with a V7 manual reveals some
changes that don't appear to be related to the portability work. But I'm not
going to comment on that further without analysis to back it up, just some anecdotal
observations at present.
Why (and when) did GNU drop the HISTORY section from
its man pages?
Adam
Did GNU ever have a HISTORY section? I just plucked a couple books off the shelf, I
don't see HISTORY in the V10, 4.4BSD, or SVR4 books, so probably a later invention in
the BSD line that didn't get picked up by other UNIX-likes? Looking at a few illumos
manpages, they also don't appear to have a HISTORY section. They appear to be there
on macOS, probably as a result of the FreeBSD origins of macOS user space. That said, I
also appreciate the HISTORY section, it's tipped me off to things to study that I
didn't know on a few occasions.
- Matt G.