Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 15:06:56 -0800 From: Rich Morin <rdm@cfcl.com> To: freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: FreeBSD manual sets (was: yacc documentation) Message-ID: <p05100308b8a1b3e70b91@[192.168.254.205]> In-Reply-To: <20020226182757.GC23959@panix.com> References: <20020225191122.A15283@chiark.greenend.org.uk> <p051003dfb8a170c0a167@[192.168.254.205]> <20020226182757.GC23959@panix.com>
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At 1:27 PM -0500 2/26/02, Adam Turoff wrote: >Do you mean the ones that were in the jointly published USENIX/O'Reilly >5-Volume 4.4BSD docset? Bingo. >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. >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. In fact, I considered doing a FreeBSD manual set, but decided that it would be so large that it would be inconvenient to use. Here are some numbers, tallied from /usr/share/man/cat?/*.gz in FreeBSD 4.5: section docs lines pages ======= ==== ====== ===== 1 590 203929 3375 1aout 8 743 15 2 212 19770 400 3 2019 355702 6371 4 239 29909 568 5 118 25387 443 6 43 4412 89 7 36 16484 269 8 335 47434 890 9 274 27174 540 Total 12960 The "pages" value is derived by counting lines and rounding up to whole pages. The values are somewhat inflated (section 3 contains multiple copies of some man pages and troff output is a bit more compact than nroff output), so let's figure 10 K pages of manuals for FreeBSD itself. That's 20 volumes at 500 pages each, and we haven't added in the papers, let alone the docs for anything in the Ports Collection. Pulling down several volumes to solve a given problem doesn't seem real convenient... 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! -r -- email: rdm@cfcl.com; phone: +1 650-873-7841 http://www.cfcl.com/rdm - my home page, resume, etc. http://www.cfcl.com/Meta - The FreeBSD Browser, Meta Project, etc. http://www.ptf.com/dossier - Prime Time Freeware's DOSSIER series http://www.ptf.com/tdc - Prime Time Freeware's Darwin Collection To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message
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