OpenAFS Man Pages Overview This directory contains the POD source and (in releases) the generated man pages for OpenAFS commands and files. The man pages are based on the original IBM AFS Administration Reference manual, released with the rest of AFS under the IBM Public License 1.0. They were converted from HTML to POD, editing, and are currently maintained in POD. The man pages are very much a work in progress. The original source material dated from IBM's public release of AFS, and many changes since made in OpenAFS are not reflected in the man pages. Help and contributions are actively solicited. Please see "How You Can Help" below for more information. The long-term goal is for every command shipped with OpenAFS and every configuration or data file written or read by OpenAFS to have its own man page. Section one is used for commands that don't require special privileges, section eight for commands for AFS administrators and local system administrators, and section five for file formats and configuration files, with the exception that command suites are kept together (so, for instance, all fs commands are documented in section one even though some of them are only usable by a local system administrator). The OpenAFS man pages are discussed on the openafs-doc mailing list at openafs.org. If you plan on contributing to the man page project, please join that mailing list and send suggestions, patches, and contributions there. The coordinator of the OpenAFS man page project is Russ Allbery ; feel free to contact me directly with questions (although using the mailing list is generally better and will probably result in a faster response). POD and Man Page Generation The OpenAFS man pages are maintained in POD (Plain Old Documentation), the documentation system originally developed for Perl. This is not an uncontroversial choice, since POD isn't as rich and full-featured as other possible alternatives such as Docbook RefEntry. On the other hand, POD is very close to plain text, can be easier to edit and maintain for those not familiar with the documentation format, and has more mature tools for conversion to formatted man pages, an output format that is particularly important on Unix/Linux. There are many good arguments either way, and fundamentally the decision was made to use POD because I prefer it and I'm volunteering to write and edit the pages and maintain them going forward. To convert the POD source to formatted man pages, you need the pod2man utility. This utility has come with Perl for many years, so if you have Perl installed, you almost certainly have some version of it available. For the best results, install Pod::Simple 3.03 or later and podlators 2.00 or later from CPAN and use that pod2man, but the results from the pod2man that comes with Perl 5.8 or later will be very good. If you are using earlier versions of Perl, the output should be adequate and readable but may contain some formatting glitches. Preformatted man pages will be included in distribution tarballs, but those man pages may be generated with older versions of the conversion utilities. To regenerate the man pages, run regen.sh at the top of the OpenAFS source tree (this will also regenerate the Autoconf scripts). Conversion to HTML can be done via any of the POD to HTML converters available (there are many of them), but for best results (particularly for crosslinks), use the generate-html script in this directory. You will need to have the Pod::Simple Perl module installed. If your Perl is not in /usr/bin, run generate-html explicitly with: perl generate-html It will generate HTML pages in the html subdirectory of this directory. Formatting Standards Each command or configuration file should have a separate man page in a separate POD file. Command suites (fs, pts, vos, etc.) should have an overview man page that lists the available subcommands by category, documents common options, and discusses the general use of the suite. Then, each operation code in the suite should have a separate man page, named after the command with the space between the command suite and the operation code replaced with an underscore. All man pages must follow the standard layout for man page sections and formatting. The best general reference is the pod2man man page, although the sections used for OpenAFS man pages aren't quite the same (see below). In particular, please use the following markup: * B<> for all commands, command/operation code pairs, and options. * F<> for file names, directory names, partition names, or paths. * > for user-provided arguments (note the surrounding <>). * I<> for terms being defined or titles of works. * C<> for command examples, ACL characters, and example arguments. Also see the afs(1) man page for general rules about how OpenAFS man pages are formatted and for standard terminology to use when talking about OpenAFS commands. Each man page should have the following sections: NAME, SYNOPSIS (for commands only), DESCRIPTION, CAUTIONS, OPTIONS (for commands only), OUTPUT (where appropriate), EXAMPLES, PRIVILEGE REQUIRED (for commands only), SEE ALSO, and COPYRIGHT, generally in that order. Be sure to include the IBM copyright in all man pages derived from the original IBM documentation. If you wrote the man page yourself, please include your own copyright and a statement that the man page is released under the IBM Public License Version 1.0, or under some other license that is sufficiently compatible that we can use your work. If you use another license and that license isn't "public domain," you have to give the full license text in the man page; please don't use a license so long that this is annoying. The SYNOPSIS section should start with the full command name and the full names of all options, and then have a second section showing the most abbreviated form of the command name and its options. If the command has aliases, it should have additional sections showing those. Please be sure to follow all of the formatting requirements for commands, flags, and options. Enclose optional arguments in [] and choices in () separated by |. Command names and options are marked up with B<> as mentioned above; all other literal text that should be entered on the command line gets no markup. References to other OpenAFS man pages should be given as L. Other man pages should be noted like df(1), without the L<> markup. References to functions should be noted like function() with the trailing parens. The POD converters know how to format these sorts of references appropriately. References to other sections in the same page should be given as L
. Command and output examples should be indented three spaces. Commands entered by the user should be given on a line beginning with %. If the command doesn't fit in 80 columns, put in a backslash at a logical break point and continue the line with an additional four spaces of indentation. Output examples may be wrapped with an additional four spaces of indentation but probably shouldn't be; not wrapping makes the man page look somewhat less readable, but is less confusing when converted to other formats such as HTML. POD does not allow markup in verbatim paragraphs (which are indicated by indenting the first line of the paragraph), so metasyntactic variables in examples should be shown like with simple angle brackets surrounding the variable. For consistency in formatting, references to those variables should be formatted the same in following text. How You Can Help The OpenAFS man page project is just starting, and a lot of work remains to be done. Any and all contributions are greatly appreciated. What follows is a list of the ways that you can help in order of increasing helpfulness. If you only have time to do something near the top of the list, please do; every little bit helps. If you have more time and can do something closer to the bottom of the list, that's even better and your contribution can be included more rapidly. * Point out places OpenAFS behavior has changed since the documentation was written, or point out missing documentation. Please check the "Known Problems" list below to make sure that the item is not already noted. * Point out formatting problems, typos, formatting inconsistency, and other markup or language problems in the man pages. * Provide missing documentation in some form (text, HTML, whatever) that can be incorporated into the man pages, or detailed explanations of how the existing documentation needs to be changed to match what the tools actually do. * Provide missing man pages in POD format suitable for immediate inclusion in the documentation. Please try to follow the formatting standards documented in the "Formatting Standards" section above, and look at the existing man pages for examples. * Provide patches against the POD source that correct formatting problems, typos, formatting inconsistencies, or other markup or language problems with the man pages. * Provide patches against the POD source that add or correct the documentation of commands or file formats for changes in OpenAFS. Please send contributions either to the openafs-doc list or as bugs filed via the bug reporting instructions at . If you do submit a bug, please send me a note at rra@stanford.edu with the bug number so that I'm aware of it, as I don't always notice new bugs. Known Problems The current man pages have the following known deficiencies. Please don't just report the deficiency again, but any contributions towards fixing it are greatly appreciated. * The following installed commands have no man pages: bos_util copyauth fs getcalleraccess fs getcrypt fs listaliases fs newalias fs rxstatpeer fs rxstatproc fs setcbaddr fs setcrypt kseal pts interactive pts quit pts sleep pts source read_tape restorevol rmtsysd vldb_convert vos changeloc vos clone vos convertROtoRW vos copy vos shadow vos size vsys * The following configuration files have no man pages: CellAlias * klog.krb, pagsh.krb, and tokens.krb need to be listed as alternative names in the NAME line of the non-.krb man pages, links should be installed on man page installation, and the behavior of pagsh.krb should be documented in the pagsh man page. * Some of the documentation in fs getserverprefs needs minor updates to reflect what happens in the dynroot case. * fs sysname documentation needs to include the possibility of setting multiple sysnames and the resulting behavior. * The afsd man page is horribly out of date. It doesn't explain dynroot, many options are missing, and some of the options described are no longer valid. It also still assumes that -settime is the default and says that the system must be rebooted after shutdown, which isn't the case at least on Linux. * bos listkeys and the KeyFile man page assume that you're using the kaserver. * I'm fairly sure that the fileserver man page no longer documents all of the fileserver options. * The package man page should probably mention the (pointless) package apropos and package help commands, or they could be removed. There used to be separate man pages for them, but that seemed rather pointless. * There are lingering references to AFS Development or AFS Product Support in descriptions of options that one should generally not use. Also, all of the manual references refer to the "IBM" manual. We should decide how to handle this terminology-wise. * The salvager actually creates a bunch of SalvageLog files and then combines them, but the SalvageLog man page doesn't reflect this. * The CellServDB documentation hasn't been updated for -dynroot. * The aklog man page isn't in POD. (Neither is the mpp man page, but I don't think we care about it and it's not currently installed.) * In the suite introduction pages (pts, vos, etc.), each of the subcommands in the initial list should be a link to the relevant page in the HTML output. This has been done for the fs intro page and the same transform needs to be applied to the other pages. See the fs intro page for the details. * The references to the other OpenAFS manuals, such as the Quick Start guide and the Admin Guide, should be links, probably to the documents on openafs.org. * There's no mention of the Kerberos v5 support. At least, we need some disclaimers under klog and friends talking about sites without kaserver (and possibly without fakeka), and deprecation warnings on the .krb varient commands. * We need a way to add links to other man pages (kinit most notably) without creating dangling links in the HTML output. This probably means that the HTML conversion script needs to generate at startup a list of all valid man page link targets and not linkify the ones that don't match a valid target. * Provide a way to substitute the correct paths into the HTML output from Autoconf results. If you notice other problems, please send them to the openafs-doc list even if you don't have time to fix them. Someone else might, and we want to track all of the issues.