Post ArHnlpEy7T00CvqEgi by awb@mastodon.sdf.org
 (DIR) More posts by awb@mastodon.sdf.org
 (DIR) Post #ArHnlpEy7T00CvqEgi by awb@mastodon.sdf.org
       2024-12-08T22:58:32Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       Finally got around to writing a new blog post, this time on Unix manual pages. Turns out the history is complicated enough, that the actual man command will have to wait until the second part!https://abochannek.github.io/utilities/2024/12/08/man-pages.htmlShout-out to everybody who went through the SunOS to Solaris transition, too. The shuffling of sections 4, 5, and 7 in SysV still annoys me thirty years later.(Reposting with public visibility)#unix #linux
       
 (DIR) Post #ArHnlqNrrriBkp0rCK by alanc@fosstodon.org
       2025-02-19T19:25:02Z
       
       1 likes, 0 repeats
       
       @awb the SysV shuffling annoyed me as well when packaging FOSS for Solaris and we'd have to shuffle their man pages to fit, and when I had to implement support for it during the conversion of X11R7 from Imake to automake.  So when I became tech lead for Solaris 12 (later renamed 11.4) I decided we'd undo it: https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/post/normalizing-man-page-section-numbers-in-solaris-114
       
 (DIR) Post #ArHnoO0xnjGsdXVnQu by cks@mastodon.social
       2025-02-18T02:58:33Z
       
       1 likes, 0 repeats
       
       @ireneista @awb I suspect that one reason POSIX never standardized troff is that AT&T was busy unbundling troff as an extra-cost option by the time POSIX started up (which AT&T called 'DWB', apparently officially short for 'Documenter's Workbench').You might wonder how this affected Unix manual pages, especially for third party stuff. 'Badly' is the general answer ; people had to distribute preformatted manpages or resort to sometimes extreme measures, such as https://doc.cat-v.org/henry_spencer/awf/