OpenGL manpages

[Jon Leech]

Vickenty Fesunov writes:
> I am interested in a fate of the OpenGL, GLU and GLX manpages shipped
> with every X release since I was a child, and which vanished with
> transition to the modular release structure in the 2005.
>
> In an old revision of ModularFilesMissing in the X.org wiki ([1]), these
> manpages are marked as dropped in favor of "SGI upstream", mentioning
> some consensus, no traces of which I could find in the archives of
> xorg-modular mailing list.
>
> SGI apparently have stopped maintaining these manpages way back in the
> 1997 (the date of last change of manpages downloaded from SGI site;
> while X.org 6.9.0 features manpages which are dated by the year 1998).
>
> Having said this much, I wonder, if anyone maintains these manual pages,
> what license applies to them (either [2] or some other license), and if
> nobody maintain them, may I just clean them up a bit and distribute them
> that way?

    As Brian noted, the ARB (now a working group within the broader
Khronos organization, www.khronos.org) is updating the man pages for
OpenGL 2.1, and will be maintaining them actively going forward. They
are essentially complete now, but we have to determine acceptable
copyrights for new pages from various non-SGI sources, which I'm
starting to talk with some X.org folks about, before a public release.
Hopefully that can get sorted out in the next couple of weeks.

    The original SGI man pages are under the SGI "Free Software B"
license, which is a BSD-like license that may still be present in some
of the GLX code in X.org as well.

    We think it would probably be a good thing to get the updated man
pages into X.org, if someone is willing to do that work on the X.org end
and keep them synced with what Khronos will be putting out. We've moved
to using Docbook 4.3 with embedded MathML as the source format, and to
get back to standard Unix man pages will take some work with the Docbook
modular stylesheets.

    Jon Leech