Sys V 3.2.1 online man pages

[~XT6561110~Frank McGee~C23~L25~6326~]

[ some stuff deleted here ]

>The Law Society of Upper Canada is an educational source-licencee with 
>separate licences for v7 and SVr3.2, both of which includes all sources
>and documentation related to the operating systems and utilities.  We have
>all the V7 man pages archived on our (now unused) V7 machine, and we have
>all 30 kg of the printed manual sets.  We understand that we do have the
                                        ^^

>right under the licence agreement with AT&T Canada to possess the nroff
>source to the full reference manual set.

You might (notice I say "might", since I don't have an exact copy of
your license to read) want to check, and make sure it is both the
understanding of you AND AT&T CANADA that you have a license for nroff
source to the man pages.

Under domestic (ie, USA) licenses, the manuals are not considered part
of the source product, and the license only covers a printed, paper
copy of the man pages.  I wasn't working for AT&T when they split the
man pages off from the source, but I believe it happened somewhere
around the time System V Release 2 was available.  The date on all of
our man pages here are 1/6/86, so it's been a long while since
they were available to us internally.

As someone mentioned in another posting today, AT&T does have
an agreement with Prentice Hall, and I don't think they would
appreciate AT&T giving away something that they intend to sell
for real money.

But there is some hope on the horizon (for System V Release 4
users atleast).  With System V Release 4, binary customers
will have man pages available in IDS format (note that this is
not the same thing as the nroff source).  IDS stands for
Information Delivery System, and it's a software package that
basically displays text, and can be used to maintain large amounts
of text information in an orderly manner.  For example, we
have some service and  technical manuals here that can be
accessed through IDS running on another system.  You can
keyword search from the table of contents, or from a
particular section, and it searches every word in the database
(your manual) for occurences of those keywords.  It then
suggests sections for you to look in, and offers to display
them for you.  As far as display software goes, it's pretty
good.  Packaging for the man page package has yet to be
determined, but it will contain a run-time version of IDS,
and the System V Release 4 man pages, in IDS format.  I don't
know if they intend to charge for the package, when it will
be available, and which platforms it will be available on (it
will be available atleast for the StarServer E).

Other than that, not even internal folks with source licenses
have up to date nroff-able manual pages.

-- 
Frank McGee, AT&T
Entry Level Systems Support
attmail!fmcgee (preferred)
att!cuuxb!fmcgee (those that can't reach attmail)