Re: man-pages-2.59 and man-pages-2.60 are released

["Michael Kerrisk" <mtk-manpages@gmx.net>]

Alexander,

> > I just released man-pages-2.59 and man-pages-2.60.
> > 
> > These releases are now available for download at:
> > 
> >     http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/manpages

Yes, just this morning I decided to tidy away some of the old
tarballs into a newly created "old" directory.
 
> There is one little problem with this: there is no stable URL for a given 
> version. 

Well, there never really was.  To date, most old tarballs have
had only a limited life on kernel.org.

> This hurts, e.g., automated Linux From Scratch rebuilds (the 
> official script grabs the URL from the book, but it becomes invalid too
> soon).
>
> Could you please, in order to avoid this, do what SAMBA team does: place 
> into http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/manpages/Old not only old 
> versions, but also the current version? This way, LFS will be sure that
> the  2.60 version is always available as 

As noted above old versions never were "always available" on
kernel.org...

> http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/manpages/Old/man-pages-2.60.tar.bz2 
> (even if it is in fact the latest version).

How about a link in /pub/linux/docs/manpages/ of the form 
"LATEST-IS-m.xy"?  Rob Landley was wanting something like this,
and I guess it would be easy for LFS to build a simple
script that looks for that link and deduces "man-pages-m.xy" 
from it.  (I've just now created such a link in the directory,
as an example.)

Cheers,

Michael
-- 
Michael Kerrisk
maintainer of Linux man pages Sections 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7 

Want to help with man page maintenance?  
Grab the latest tarball at
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/manpages , 
read the HOWTOHELP file and grep the source 
files for 'FIXME'.