From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040422 Epiphany/1.2.4 Description of problem: After upgrading to Fedora Linux 1.92, the ps manual page looks far worse. It has lost significant structure (and inherent formatting when typeset such as bold typefaces and indentation). It also seems to have changed some text for the worse, for instance, what previously had: "Unix98 options may be grouped and must be preceeded by a dash." has: "Unix options may be grouped and must be preceeded by a dash." In this case, Unix98 is not a generic term, but rather it refers to the Unix98 standard, as superset of POSIX (see http://www.unix-systems.org/unix98.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX98), so the document is now incorrect. Another minor example is the unnecessary stylistic change from: "GNU" to: "Gnu". Looking at the source man document, you notice that except for the title and header, all formatting has been stripped from the document. It seems the upstream author disdains man pages and has seen fit to remove the formatting when updating it. This is a regression. Except for bug 107914, the manual page was far better formatted and in some ways more correct in Fedora Linux 1. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): procps-3.2.0-1.1 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: formatted: man ps raw source: zcat /usr/share/man/man1/ps.1.gz | less Actual Results: Manual page appears essentially unformatted. Expected Results: Manual page appears formatted as it once did. Additional info: Not a big deal, but noticeable and needless IMHO.
It seems the package author is acahalan.edu. I'll also raise the issue with him and try to come up with a reformatted version when I find the time.
The Red Hat procps and the more mainstream one used to be distinct forks. FC now follows the generic one but its not as good in some ways still (eg the manual page)
Modified ps.1 to match 2.0.17 version. procps-3.2.2-2 Dan
I do have two proposed replacements from somebody at SuSE. The formatting still isn't quite right. I've yet to find someone capable of producing a "proper" man page that is formatted as neatly as the one full of evil hacks. For example, *roff tends to introduce hyphens and spaces. These may be syntactically significant, and so the examples become incorrect. Finding such errors is difficult, in part because the errors will vary with output width. Normall *roff tends to produce ugly tables that don't line up with each other. ******** begin example #1 ************* SOME HEADER HERE -f foo option b bar option --baz baz option OTHER HEADER HERE -p pee option q queue option --stupendous stupendous option ********** end example #1 ************** Other ways of formatting such tables lead to this: ********* begin example #2 ************** OTHER HEADER HERE -p pee option q queue option --stupendous stupendous option (on wrong line) ************* end example #2 ************* Plus *roff wastes valuable space on margins, even when output is to a tty. You wouldn't want "ls" to do that, would you? How about I make "ps" indent the output by some large arbitrary amount? This would cause wrapping for no good reason. As a final insult, *roff throws in useless page headers. Mind you, this isn't PostScript output. It's tty output. Web browsers don't chop up their output like that! There's no reason for "man ps" to chop up the output either.
There is a new man page now. It's much more verbose; hopefully people won't get lost in it due to sheer size. The formatting should be quite good. There is one known problem involving the format options table when output is for PostScript, PDF, DVI, and so on. Lines may be too wide, perhaps due to problems with groff math units. (pica, point, inch, centimeter, em, en... oh dear my)