The best documentation on syscalls available to userspace is the man-pages package. I converted these man pages to html with doclifter, and put the result up at http://kernel.org/doc/xmlman The script I use to re-convert it when new versions are released is in the mercurial archive http://landley.net/hg/kdocs and the current version is at http://kernel.org/make/mkxmlman.sh (which uses fixlinks.py in the same directory). Doclifter is a tool to convert man page markup (troff and lots of macro packages on top of it) to docbook. In addition to allowing the conversion of man pages to html and pdf, this allows man page maintainers to switch to docbook versions as the master copies they maintain, and generate man pages from the docbook. An explicit goal of the doclifter project is to eliminate man markup as a source format anything is maintained in. Very few people understand it anymore (as evidenced by how many man pages have markup errors), it's difficult and unrewarding to learn, and there are better modern formats. I worked with Eric Raymond to convert the Doclifter development repository to Mercurial, and put it online at http://thyrsus.com/hg/doclifter. I fed several bug fixes upstream, but I've identified two more blocking bugs for the release of the next version that I haven't fully fixed yet: symlinks are created with incorrect paths (I submitted a partial fix), and the source directories for a conversion pass are not properly detected by manlifter. Both problems involve some internal assumptions (in the manlifter part of doclifter) about what man page paths will be. I've worked around both bugs in my man-pages update script, but would ideally like to get manlifter to handle this conversion itself, without workarounds. I'm also not happy with the output of doclifter; it can definitely be improved in places. Some of it is that I need to dig up some css to make it look less ugly (Eric had some, I should ask him for it). And there are some "just plain bugs" such as http://kernel.org/doc/xmlman/man5/elf.html saying "<Pa elf.h>" for some reason. (Others are harder to figure out how to address such as the way http://kernel.org/doc/xmlman/man0/sched.h.html shows the original making extensive use of fixed width fonts for indentation in a way that just doesn't translate. Possibly having the right stylesheet makes that less obvious?) There's probably also a way to make "one big pdf" from all these little .xml files, which might look less awful... However, my work on doclifter has gone on the back burner for the moment, because the man-pages maintainer (Michael Kerrisk) has expressed interest in maintaining his own HTML translations of the man-pages package. I've given him the directory http://kernel.org/doc/man-pages, Peter Anvin's changed the permissions on that directory so it belongs to him, and my update scripts now exclude it from my update rsync. But he hasn't put any content in it yet. I'll happily link to that once he puts some content there, but so far he hasn't. I was linking to the empty directory for a bit, but I'm back to linking to (and updating) mine until his directory has equivalent content. Rob -- "One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code." - Ken Thompson. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-doc" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
