5 This directory contains the POD source and (in releases) the generated
6 man pages for OpenAFS commands and files. The man pages are based on
7 the original IBM AFS Administration Reference manual, released with the
8 rest of AFS under the IBM Public License 1.0. They were converted from
9 HTML to POD, editing, and are currently maintained in POD.
11 The man pages are very much a work in progress. The original source
12 material dated from IBM's public release of AFS, and many changes since
13 made in OpenAFS are not reflected in the man pages. Help and
14 contributions are actively solicited. Please see "How You Can Help"
15 below for more information.
17 The long-term goal is for every command shipped with OpenAFS and every
18 configuration or data file written or read by OpenAFS to have its own
19 man page. Section one is used for commands that don't require special
20 privileges, section eight for commands for AFS administrators and local
21 system administrators, and section five for file formats and
22 configuration files, with the exception that command suites are kept
23 together (so, for instance, all fs commands are documented in section
24 one even though some of them are only usable by a local system
27 The OpenAFS man pages are discussed on the openafs-doc mailing list at
28 openafs.org. If you plan on contributing to the man page project,
29 please join that mailing list and send suggestions, patches, and
30 contributions there. The coordinator of the OpenAFS man page project is
31 Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>; feel free to contact me directly with
32 questions (although using the mailing list is generally better and will
33 probably result in a faster response).
35 POD and Man Page Generation
37 The OpenAFS man pages are maintained in POD (Plain Old Documentation),
38 the documentation system originally developed for Perl. This is not an
39 uncontroversial choice, since POD isn't as rich and full-featured as
40 other possible alternatives such as Docbook RefEntry. On the other
41 hand, POD is very close to plain text, can be easier to edit and
42 maintain for those not familiar with the documentation format, and has
43 more mature tools for conversion to formatted man pages, an output
44 format that is particularly important on Unix/Linux. There are many
45 good arguments either way, and fundamentally the decision was made to
46 use POD because I prefer it and I'm volunteering to write and edit the
47 pages and maintain them going forward.
49 To convert the POD source to formatted man pages, you need the pod2man
50 utility. This utility has come with Perl for many years, so if you have
51 Perl installed, you almost certainly have some version of it available.
52 For the best results, install Pod::Simple 3.03 or later and podlators
53 2.00 or later from CPAN and use that pod2man, but the results from the
54 pod2man that comes with Perl 5.8 or later will be very good. If you are
55 using earlier versions of Perl, the output should be adequate and
56 readable but may contain some formatting glitches.
58 Preformatted man pages will be included in distribution tarballs, but
59 those man pages may be generated with older versions of the conversion
60 utilities. To regenerate the man pages, run regen.sh at the top of the
61 OpenAFS source tree (this will also regenerate the Autoconf scripts).
63 Conversion to HTML can be done via any of the POD to HTML converters
64 available (there are many of them). Evaluation of the best tool to use
65 for OpenAFS and exactly how to do the conversion to get the highest
66 quality results is still underway; when complete, details will be
71 Each command or configuration file should have a separate man page in a
72 separate POD file. Command suites (fs, pts, vos, etc.) should have an
73 overview man page that lists the available subcommands by category,
74 documents common options, and discusses the general use of the suite.
75 Then, each operation code in the suite should have a separate man page,
76 named after the command with the space between the command suite and the
77 operation code replaced with an underscore.
79 All man pages must follow the standard layout for man page sections and
80 formatting. The best general reference is the pod2man man page,
81 although the sections used for OpenAFS man pages aren't quite the same
82 (see below). In particular, please use the following markup:
84 * B<> for all commands, command/operation code pairs, and options.
85 * F<> for file names, directory names, partition names, or paths.
86 * <I<>> for user-provided arguments (note the surrounding <>).
87 * I<> for terms being defined or titles of works.
88 * C<> for command examples, ACL characters, and example arguments.
90 Also see the afs(1) man page for general rules about how OpenAFS man
91 pages are formatted and for standard terminology to use when talking
92 about OpenAFS commands.
94 Each man page should have the following sections: NAME, SYNOPSIS (for
95 commands only), DESCRIPTION, CAUTIONS, OPTIONS (for commands only),
96 OUTPUT (where appropriate), EXAMPLES, PRIVILEGE REQUIRED (for commands
97 only), SEE ALSO, and COPYRIGHT, generally in that order. Be sure to
98 include the IBM copyright in all man pages derived from the original IBM
99 documentation. If you wrote the man page yourself, please include your
100 own copyright and a statement that the man page is released under the
101 IBM Public License Version 1.0, or under some other license that is
102 sufficiently compatible that we can use your work. If you use another
103 license and that license isn't "public domain," you have to give the
104 full license text in the man page; please don't use a license so long
105 that this is annoying.
107 The SYNOPSIS section should start with the full command name and the
108 full names of all options, and then have a second section showing the
109 most abbreviated form of the command name and its options. If the
110 command has aliases, it should have additional sections showing those.
111 Please be sure to follow all of the formatting requirements for
112 commands, flags, and options. Enclose optional arguments in [] and
113 choices in () separated by |. Command names and options are marked up
114 with B<> as mentioned above; all other literal text that should be
115 entered on the command line gets no markup.
117 References to other OpenAFS man pages should be given as L<afs(1)>.
118 Other man pages should be noted like df(1), without the L<> markup.
119 References to functions should be noted like function() with the
120 trailing parens. The POD converters know how to format these sorts of
121 references appropriately. References to other sections in the same page
122 should be given as L<SECTION>.
124 Command and output examples should be indented three spaces. Commands
125 entered by the user should be given on a line beginning with %. If the
126 command doesn't fit in 80 columns, put in a backslash at a logical break
127 point and continue the line with an additional four spaces of
128 indentation. Output examples may be wrapped with an additional four
129 spaces of indentation but probably shouldn't be; not wrapping makes the
130 man page look somewhat less readable, but is less confusing when
131 converted to other formats such as HTML.
133 POD does not allow markup in verbatim paragraphs (which are indicated by
134 indenting the first line of the paragraph), so metasyntactic variables
135 in examples should be shown like <this> with simple angle brackets
136 surrounding the variable. For consistency in formatting, references to
137 those variables should be formatted the same in following text.
141 The OpenAFS man page project is just starting, and a lot of work remains
142 to be done. Any and all contributions are greatly appreciated. What
143 follows is a list of the ways that you can help in order of increasing
144 helpfulness. If you only have time to do something near the top of the
145 list, please do; every little bit helps. If you have more time and can
146 do something closer to the bottom of the list, that's even better and
147 your contribution can be included more rapidly.
149 * Point out places OpenAFS behavior has changed since the documentation
150 was written, or point out missing documentation. Please check the
151 "Known Problems" list below to make sure that the item is not already
154 * Point out formatting problems, typos, formatting inconsistency, and
155 other markup or language problems in the man pages.
157 * Provide missing documentation in some form (text, HTML, whatever)
158 that can be incorporated into the man pages, or detailed explanations
159 of how the existing documentation needs to be changed to match what
160 the tools actually do.
162 * Provide missing man pages in POD format suitable for immediate
163 inclusion in the documentation. Please try to follow the formatting
164 standards documented in the "Formatting Standards" section above, and
165 look at the existing man pages for examples.
167 * Provide patches against the POD source that correct formatting
168 problems, typos, formatting inconsistencies, or other markup or
169 language problems with the man pages.
171 * Provide patches against the POD source that add or correct the
172 documentation of commands or file formats for changes in OpenAFS.
174 Please send contributions either to the openafs-doc list or as bugs
175 filed via the bug reporting instructions at <http://www.openafs.org/>.
176 If you do submit a bug, please send me a note at rra@stanford.edu with
177 the bug number so that I'm aware of it, as I don't always notice new
182 The current man pages have the following known deficiencies. Please
183 don't just report the deficiency again, but any contributions towards
184 fixing it are greatly appreciated.
186 * The section five and section eight man pages have not yet had an
187 initial editing pass and many of the section five man pages are
188 missing because the original reference page names didn't easily
189 convert to man page names. This is currently being fixed. Please do
190 not start working on the section five or section eight man pages yet
191 or bother reporting problems with them; they will be changing
192 significantly in the near future.
194 * The following commands have no man pages:
215 * klog.krb, pagsh.krb, and tokens.krb need to be listed as alternative
216 names in the NAME line of the non-.krb man pages, links should be
217 installed on man page installation, and the behavior of pagsh.krb
218 should be documented in the pagsh man page.
220 * Some of the documentation in fs getserverprefs needs minor updates to
221 reflect what happens in the dynroot case.
223 * fs sysname documentation needs to include the possibility of setting
224 multiple sysnames and the resulting behavior.
226 * The afsd man page is horribly out of date. It doesn't explain
227 dynroot, many options are missing, and some of the options described
228 are no longer valid. It also still assumes that -settime is the
229 default and says that the system must be rebooted after shutdown,
230 which isn't the case at least on Linux.
232 * All of the paths in the man pages are the Transarc paths. I'm not
233 sure how best to deal with the possibility of installing OpenAFS in
234 multiple different paths, but it would be good to at least
235 acknowledge the issue.
237 * bos listkeys assumes that you're using the kaserver.
239 * I'm fairly sure that the fileserver man page no longer documents all
240 of the fileserver options.
242 * The package man page should probably mention the (pointless) package
243 apropos and package help commands, or they could be removed. There
244 used to be separate man pages for them, but that seemed rather
247 * There are lingering references to AFS Development or AFS Product
248 Support in descriptions of options that one should generally not
249 use. Also, all of the manual references refer to the "IBM" manual.
250 We should decide how to handle this terminology-wise.
252 If you notice other problems, please send them to the openafs-doc list
253 even if you don't have time to fix them. Someone else might, and we
254 want to track all of the issues.