From owner-freebsd-doc Tue Feb 26 15:59: 5 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-doc@freebsd.org Received: from mail1.panix.com (mail1.panix.com [166.84.1.72]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0AC1E37B402 for ; Tue, 26 Feb 2002 15:59:02 -0800 (PST) Received: from panix2.panix.com (panix2.panix.com [166.84.1.2]) by mail1.panix.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 21D074877A; Tue, 26 Feb 2002 18:59:01 -0500 (EST) Received: (from ziggy@localhost) by panix2.panix.com (8.11.3nb1/8.8.8/PanixN1.0) id g1QNx1627790; Tue, 26 Feb 2002 18:59:01 -0500 (EST) Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 18:59:01 -0500 From: Adam Turoff To: Rich Morin Cc: freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD manual sets (was: yacc documentation) Message-ID: <20020226235901.GA23559@panix.com> References: <20020225191122.A15283@chiark.greenend.org.uk> <20020226182757.GC23959@panix.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.25i Sender: owner-freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org 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. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message