[TUHS] Project Idea: The UNIX Programmer's Manual: Heritage Edition

[markus schnalke]

Hoi.

[2023-09-20 06:16] "Jeremy C. Reed" <reed at reedmedia.net>
> > Additionally, if possible, I'd love to run down some authorship 
> > information and make sure folks who wrote stuff up over time are 
> > properly credited, if not on each page ala OWNER at least in a 
> > Acknowledgements section in the front.
> 
> My NetBSD section 8 was two long printed book volumes.
> 
> 68 printed pages 1461 through 1529 had 109 different licences (no 
> duplicate verbiage) and corresponding copyrights and required 
> acknowledgement statements.
> 
> The permuted index was also 68 pages long.
> 
> The books will be several volumes long and likely ten thousand of 
> pages.
> 
> (Not very many sold, it was large learning project.)

Good point.

Original manpages reprinted and collected would not interest me
much. That stuff is available online and to me more a reference
than something I take to bed reading in the evening. This kind of
content also leads to the copyright annoyance described above.

Much more am I interested in something like Doug's Unix Reader,
i.e. commented history and folklore around the tools, collected and
arranged. Of course, this is much more work, but it's more original
work and to me of greater uniqueness and value.

Thus, let's make the manpages *only* contain the History section!
... plus Changes, Bugs, Quirks, Versions, Differences, ...

Of course, that would be the Unix Historian's Manual then. ;-)


meillo


P.S.
Adding good manpages to info-only or manpage-stub programs would be
a relief, too.