Wednesday, February 26, 2014

man-pages-3.61 is released

I've released man-pages-3.61. The release tarball is available on kernel.org. The browsable online pages can be found on man7.org. The Git repository for man-pages is available on kernel.org.

This was a relatively small release. Among the more notable changes in man-pages-3.61 are the following:

  • As ever, Peng Haitao continued adding notes on thread-safety to various manual pages.
  • A note from Christoph Hellwig prompted me to perform a task that has been queued for a while: merging the text of the man pages for the "directory file descriptor" APIs into their corresponding traditional pages. When the "directory file descriptor" pages were originally written (mostly in 2006), the APIs were not part of POSIX and (in most cases) were not available on other systems. So, it made some sense to wall them off into their own separate pages. Eight years later, with the APIs now all in POSIX (except scandirat()), it is much more sensible to document the newer APIs alongside their traditional counterparts, so that the newer APIs are not "hidden", and the reader can more easily see the differences between the APIs.

    Thus, the text of 14 pairs of pages has been merged, and the "merged from" pages have been converted to links to the "merged to" pages. Along the way, a few other fixes were made to the pages, as noted below. The resulting merged pages are: access(2), chmod(2), chown(2), link(2), mkdir(2), mknod(2), open(2), readlink(2), rename(2), stat(2), symlink(2), unlink(2), mkfifo(3), and scandir(3).

    One page that did not undergo such a change was utimensat(2), which is different enough from utime(2) that it warrants a separate page. Unlike the other pages, the utimensat(2) page was also already self-contained, rather than defining itself in terms of differences from the traditional API as the other pages did.
In addition, smaller improvements and fixes have been made to many other pages.

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