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), but for best results (particularly
65 for crosslinks), use the generate-html script in this directory. You
66 will need to have the Pod::Simple Perl module installed. If your Perl
67 is not in /usr/bin, run generate-html explicitly with:
71 It will generate HTML pages in the html subdirectory of this directory.
75 Each command or configuration file should have a separate man page in a
76 separate POD file. Command suites (fs, pts, vos, etc.) should have an
77 overview man page that lists the available subcommands by category,
78 documents common options, and discusses the general use of the suite.
79 Then, each operation code in the suite should have a separate man page,
80 named after the command with the space between the command suite and the
81 operation code replaced with an underscore. The NAME section of the
82 operation man page must also use an underscore (fs_listacl, not fs
83 listacl) for compatibility with some man programs. The SYNOPSIS section
84 should, of course, use a space, since that's what the user must type.
86 All man pages must follow the standard layout for man page sections and
87 formatting. The best general reference is the pod2man man page,
88 although the sections used for OpenAFS man pages aren't quite the same
89 (see below). In particular, please use the following markup:
91 * B<> for all commands, command/operation code pairs, and options.
92 * F<> for file names, directory names, partition names, or paths.
93 * <I<>> for user-provided arguments (note the surrounding <>).
94 * I<> for terms being defined or titles of works.
95 * C<> for command examples, ACL characters, and example arguments.
97 Also see the afs(1) man page for general rules about how OpenAFS man
98 pages are formatted and for standard terminology to use when talking
99 about OpenAFS commands.
101 Each man page should have the following sections: NAME, SYNOPSIS (for
102 commands only), DESCRIPTION, CAUTIONS, OPTIONS (for commands only),
103 OUTPUT (where appropriate), EXAMPLES, PRIVILEGE REQUIRED (for commands
104 only), SEE ALSO, and COPYRIGHT, generally in that order. Be sure to
105 include the IBM copyright in all man pages derived from the original IBM
106 documentation. If you wrote the man page yourself, please include your
107 own copyright and a statement that the man page is released under the
108 IBM Public License Version 1.0, or under some other license that is
109 sufficiently compatible that we can use your work. If you use another
110 license and that license isn't "public domain," you have to give the
111 full license text in the man page; please don't use a license so long
112 that this is annoying.
114 The SYNOPSIS section should start with the full command name and the
115 full names of all options, and then have a second section showing the
116 most abbreviated form of the command name and its options. If the
117 command has aliases, it should have additional sections showing those.
118 Please be sure to follow all of the formatting requirements for
119 commands, flags, and options. Enclose optional arguments in [] and
120 choices in () separated by |. Command names and options are marked up
121 with B<> as mentioned above; all other literal text that should be
122 entered on the command line gets no markup.
124 References to other OpenAFS man pages should be given as L<afs(1)>.
125 Other man pages should be noted like df(1), without the L<> markup.
126 References to functions should be noted like function() with the
127 trailing parens. The POD converters know how to format these sorts of
128 references appropriately. References to other sections in the same page
129 should be given as L<SECTION>. Man pages for all other AFS commands or
130 file formats referenced in the page should be listed in the SYNOPSIS.
131 List each reference on its own line for easier addition of other
132 references later, but don't put blank lines between them. Don't forget
133 the commas at the end of each line but the last.
135 Command and output examples should be indented three spaces. Commands
136 entered by the user should be given on a line beginning with %. If the
137 command doesn't fit in 80 columns, put in a backslash at a logical break
138 point and continue the line with an additional four spaces of
139 indentation. Output examples may be wrapped with an additional four
140 spaces of indentation but probably shouldn't be; not wrapping makes the
141 man page look somewhat less readable, but is less confusing when
142 converted to other formats such as HTML.
144 POD does not allow markup in verbatim paragraphs (which are indicated by
145 indenting the first line of the paragraph), so metasyntactic variables
146 in examples should be shown like <this> with simple angle brackets
147 surrounding the variable. For consistency in formatting, references to
148 those variables should be formatted the same in following text.
152 The OpenAFS man page project is just starting, and a lot of work remains
153 to be done. Any and all contributions are greatly appreciated. What
154 follows is a list of the ways that you can help in order of increasing
155 helpfulness. If you only have time to do something near the top of the
156 list, please do; every little bit helps. If you have more time and can
157 do something closer to the bottom of the list, that's even better and
158 your contribution can be included more rapidly.
160 * Point out places OpenAFS behavior has changed since the documentation
161 was written, or point out missing documentation. Please check the
162 "Known Problems" list below to make sure that the item is not already
165 * Point out formatting problems, typos, formatting inconsistency, and
166 other markup or language problems in the man pages.
168 * Provide missing documentation in some form (text, HTML, whatever)
169 that can be incorporated into the man pages, or detailed explanations
170 of how the existing documentation needs to be changed to match what
171 the tools actually do.
173 * Provide missing man pages in POD format suitable for immediate
174 inclusion in the documentation. Please try to follow the formatting
175 standards documented in the "Formatting Standards" section above, and
176 look at the existing man pages for examples.
178 * Provide patches against the POD source that correct formatting
179 problems, typos, formatting inconsistencies, or other markup or
180 language problems with the man pages.
182 * Provide patches against the POD source that add or correct the
183 documentation of commands or file formats for changes in OpenAFS.
185 Please send contributions either to the openafs-doc list or as bugs
186 filed via the bug reporting instructions at <http://www.openafs.org/>.
187 If you do submit a bug, please send me a note at rra@stanford.edu with
188 the bug number so that I'm aware of it, as I don't always notice new
191 You can test your new POD documentation by running the check-pod script
192 in this directory with "prove check-pod". (And check other people's
193 documentation and find any problems that have crept in.) You will need
194 to have Test::Pod installed.
198 The current man pages have the following known deficiencies. Please
199 don't just report the deficiency again, but any contributions towards
200 fixing it are greatly appreciated.
202 * The following installed 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 * bos listkeys and the KeyFile man page assume that you're using the
229 * bos addkey should be marked deprecated in favor of using asetkey with
232 * I'm fairly sure that the fileserver man page no longer documents all
233 of the fileserver options.
235 * There are lingering references to AFS Development or AFS Product
236 Support in descriptions of options that one should generally not
237 use. Also, all of the manual references refer to the "IBM" manual.
238 We should decide how to handle this terminology-wise.
240 * The salvager actually creates a bunch of SalvageLog files and then
241 combines them, but the SalvageLog man page doesn't reflect this.
243 * The CellServDB documentation hasn't been updated for -dynroot.
245 * In the suite introduction pages (pts, vos, etc.), each of the
246 subcommands in the initial list should be a link to the relevant
247 page in the HTML output. This has been done for the fs intro page
248 and the same transform needs to be applied to the other pages. See
249 the fs intro page for the details.
251 * The references to the other OpenAFS manuals, such as the Quick Start
252 guide and the Admin Guide, should be links, probably to the documents
255 * There's no mention of the Kerberos v5 support. At least, we need
256 some disclaimers under klog and friends talking about sites without
257 kaserver (and possibly without fakeka), and deprecation warnings
258 on the .krb varient commands.
260 * We need a way to add links to other man pages (kinit most notably)
261 without creating dangling links in the HTML output. This probably
262 means that the HTML conversion script needs to generate at startup
263 a list of all valid man page link targets and not linkify the ones
264 that don't match a valid target.
266 * Provide a way to substitute the correct paths into the HTML output
267 from Autoconf results.
269 * Currently, the man pages are built by regen.sh, which is somewhat
270 annoying since it takes a long time. Figure out how better to do this
271 during the release process so that end users don't have to have
274 * Review the sections used for all man pages against what directories
275 the commands are installed into. (In some cases, it may be better to
276 change the directory than the section of the man page.)
278 If you notice other problems, please send them to the openafs-doc list
279 even if you don't have time to fix them. Someone else might, and we
280 want to track all of the issues.
git://git.openafs.org / openafs.git / blob