Manual pages

[Paul Sutton <pa...@ukweb.com>]

As we are getting near a release (non-beta) I have been looking at the
documentation that is distributed. We do include a (basic) man page for
httpd but it is out-of-date and slightly misleading. I've updated it for
1.2. 

Am I the only person that still uses Unix manual pages? I think they are
quite important for Unix applications and I certainly like to see them in
stuff I download from the net. I'd like to see all the programs
distributed with Apache having manual pages... in particular, things like
htpasswd and dbmmanage which are likely to be used by real users as well
as the person who downloaded the distribution. So I've also created a
manual page for htpasswd. If anyone else thinks this is a good idea I'll
create one for dbmmanage and dbmmanage.new as well. None of these programs
are documented in htdocs, by the way.

Oh, and I think it would be nice if there was a top-level install target
which installed the programs, man pages and created a server root (I was
never very keen on the NCSA model of running the server from the same
directory it was compiled in). Not for 1.2 though. 

Anyway, the main changes to the httpd manual page are:

 - remove implication that inetd is the best way to start httpd
 - add -h and -l options
 - warn that paths in the manual page might be wrong
 - make httpd a section 8 command
 - change the copyright to The Apache Group

The attachments are a patch for the roff source and a formatted version.
Also included here is a manual page for htpasswd as roff source and
formatted. 

//pcs

Re: Manual pages

[Paul Sutton <pa...@ukweb.com>]

On Tue, 18 Feb 1997, Marc Slemko wrote:
> >  - change the copyright to The Apache Group
> Looks good. Can the copyright be changed?

No, probably not. 

There are only three or four (I think) paragraphs of the original still in
the httpd manual page. I'll replace those paragraphs (the definition of
-f, -d and -X) with the corresponding text from the Apache manual (which
is not explicitly copyrighted). Then I'll copyright the whole document for
The Apache Group. 

I'll commit this when hyperreal is feeling better.

//pcs

Re: Manual pages

[Marc Slemko <ma...@znep.com>]

On Tue, 18 Feb 1997, Paul Sutton wrote:

> Am I the only person that still uses Unix manual pages? I think they are
> quite important for Unix applications and I certainly like to see them in
> stuff I download from the net. I'd like to see all the programs
> distributed with Apache having manual pages... in particular, things like
> htpasswd and dbmmanage which are likely to be used by real users as well
> as the person who downloaded the distribution. So I've also created a
> manual page for htpasswd. If anyone else thinks this is a good idea I'll
> create one for dbmmanage and dbmmanage.new as well. None of these programs
> are documented in htdocs, by the way.

I love man pages and hate the FSF for claiming they are useless, obsolete,
etc. and replacing them with unusable info junk.  I like the idea.

> Anyway, the main changes to the httpd manual page are:
> 
>  - remove implication that inetd is the best way to start httpd
>  - add -h and -l options
>  - warn that paths in the manual page might be wrong
>  - make httpd a section 8 command
>  - change the copyright to The Apache Group

Looks good. Can the copyright be changed?