Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 18:59:01 -0500 From: Adam Turoff <ziggy@panix.com> To: Rich Morin <rdm@cfcl.com> Cc: freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD manual sets (was: yacc documentation) Message-ID: <20020226235901.GA23559@panix.com> In-Reply-To: <p05100308b8a1b3e70b91@[192.168.254.205]> References: <20020225191122.A15283@chiark.greenend.org.uk> <p051003dfb8a170c0a167@[192.168.254.205]> <20020226182757.GC23959@panix.com> <p05100308b8a1b3e70b91@[192.168.254.205]>
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On Tue, Feb 26, 2002 at 03:06:56PM -0800, Rich Morin wrote:
> At 1:27 PM -0500 2/26/02, Adam Turoff wrote:
> >What's the copyright status on those papers?
>
> These papers are in the 4.4BSD distribution, but missing from the FreeBSD
> distribution, largely because of copyright issues. AFAIK, these issues
> are now resolved, so the papers should be OK for anyone to include.
You mean like in /usr/share/doc/{smm|usd|psd}? :-)
> >I was overjoyed when I found all five volumes in one fell swoop a couple
> >of years ago. Would it be possible to reprint them in their entirety
> >today? Would it be possible to work with USENIX to produce a new version
> >of something similar and up-to-date?
>
> I also own a set, which I guard zealously. OTOH, the sales of these sets
> sagged with each version, eventually getting to the point where publishing
> more was deemed impractical (i.e., not enough projected sales to merit an
> offset print run).
>
> In the meanwhile, however, I have been working on setting up DOSSIER, a
> demand-publishing service for Free and Open Source software. DOSSIER is
> already publishing selected documents from the FreeBSD distribution and
> could, in theory, print up a complete FreeBSD manual set.
[math that comes to 20 volumes of 500 pages of printed manpages]
Ya know, I think the days of the Big (Grey|Orange|Beige) Wall are
thankfully a thing of the past. The manuals have grown to the point
where what's really needed is a fully integrated, cross referenced
and hyperlinked online manuals. Much like KDE provides with
man:troff type urls in Konqueror.
But...
> Consequently, DOSSIER provides topical volumes (e.g., "File Systems:
> FreeBSD"); each volume contains a "working set" of documents on a given
> topic. I'm open to suggestions, however; if folks want a particular
> collection and I can print it, I'll be quite happy to do so!
...this approach seems like the happy medium. I don't know what the
value of a printed version of section 4 would be, or how complete
section 3 would be if it omits what manpages for what many programmers
use today: perl, python, java, ruby, etc. 30 years ago, a printed
version of man(3) was *very* useful because everyone was using C
or C APIs.
What would be truly nice if {smm|usd|psd|*} were to be resurrected
to be current and modern. Many of the documents in /usr/src/doc/en
would be applicable, but there are many gaps to be filled. Of course,
with an all-vounteer project, this would be more than a simple matter
of content aggregation to fill in the missing pieces...
Z.
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