[TUHS] Manpage Analysis Repository (And V1/V2 roff Restorations)

segaloco via TUHS tuhs at tuhs.org
Mon Apr 3 15:03:56 AEST 2023


Good evening or whatever time of day you find yourself in.  I've just finished the first tag in a git repository I've put together to track UNIX developments as documented in the manual.  In preparation for this, I also created restorations of the V1 and V2 manuals in roff based on the available V3 sources.  The repositories for all this can be found here:

https://gitlab.com/segaloco/mandiff
https://gitlab.com/segaloco/v1man
https://gitlab.com/segaloco/v2man

There are most certainly typos and minor discrepancies still to be found between sources and the PDF scans, but given all the cross-referencing involved I believe the manual restorations to be largely complete.

As for the mandiff repository, the commit log (which might shake up in format...) should capture relatively complete transactions of either a particular feature or comparable additions, deletions, or modifications.  That said, there may be little fixes in later commits of edits that really should've been in other ones, and the toc and index accuracy at any given commit is dubious at best.  However, the content of the pages themselves should be pretty well broken up in to noteworthy transactions.

If you find a problem or have a correction, feel free to send it my way or even better, open a pull request with an explanation for the change.  This repository will accrete more UNIX releases as time goes on, with a first goal being getting to V6, after which the fragmentary pathways will be a little harder to reconcile to a single informative trunk.  I might start branches at that point.

By the way, in this process I found that the V2 manual scanned by Dennis Ritchie [1] contains references to nroff(I) in the TOC and permuted index, but the page may not have been in his copy.  Given this, just to not hang up on it, I simply dropped in the V3 page with a note about this in the BUGS section.

1 - https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/Dennis_v2/v2man.pdf 

- Matt G.


More information about the TUHS mailing list