Subject: Re: A few questions about the History of Unix Manpages: mdoc.7
From: Cindy Livingston
Date: 20/03/2026, 19:22
To: Kristaps Dzonsons

Hmm,

I was asked to make the pages AT&T free and formatting consistent.  They were wildly inconsistent coming from different sources.

I did the history of all the pages as it was necessary to clarify the ownership, besides rewriting some of them.  In the process I got frustrated with the formatting.  I wanted a simple system that made it possible to control the formatting outside of the manpage, similar to the concept of a .h file.

Markup languages were beginning to appear and be debated at that time and apple had a hypertext attempt.    The markup stuff looked to be a disaster, highly dependent on each person who input the markup.  This led me to develop an abbreviated type of markup by determining the context rather than the formatting.  CSRG tolerated my stuff banging on their systems.  I wanted to fully implement everything in groff as it would have been easier and faster than troff, but Mike Karels did not want that.  He wanted it ditroff compatible.

It took a lot of flex, awk, sed, etc to massage and convert all the pages.  This was the last necessary piece for BSD to be free and beholden to an AT&T license.

It just made sense to me to do what I did and Apple came along after it was alone and went thanks - and grabbed everything, because it just worked.  I had wanted to develop a compatible system that could be dropped into code to assist programmers in doing the documentation but that never came to pass.

Hope that helps.

Cindy

On Fri, Mar 20, 2026 at 4:19 PM Kristaps Dzonsons

    Hi Cynthia,

    This is Kristaps Dzonsons---by way of intro, I put the initial bits into
    mandoc(1) before it was made into the system it is today by the
    incredible Ingo Schwarze.  Kirk McKusick gave me your email address, so
    I hope I'm not imposing by writing!

    About that: I'm writing to you about another project of mine, the
    History of Unix Manpages [1].  To date, the History has focussed
    exclusively on the roff tools.  Recently, I've been preparing a major
    addition with the history of its formats (man.7, pre-man.7, mdoc.7) and
    constellation of man tools (man, apropos, whatis, etc.).

    Your work in mdoc.7 is a central part of this, and I wonder if I might
    ask you a few questions about its development?  If you're ok with it,
    I'd like to include any responses (redacted for privacy of course) in
    the record as well.  If you'd rather I didn't, no problem.

    The first record I can find of mdoc.7 is in BSD 4.3 Reno release, with
    the first commits being in 1991 in the CSRG source repo [2], so the
    source itself is pretty entrenched.  Ingo has talked to you previously
    about this and its versions I see [3], so all of that has nice tidy
    answers already.

    What I'm more curious about is the driving force behind moving away from
    McIlroy's man(7) in the first place.  Was this something you started, or
    was it passed down from management?  Was there any back-and-forth with
    others?  You seem to be the only one committing into those files except
    for Keith Bostic.  (I've written to Keith separately, with no response
    yet, about whether he wrote the first BSD-licensed version of man.c in
    Net/2.)

    And maybe more generally, did you or have you ever thought about where
    manpages would go after mdoc.7?

    Anyway, just a few question for now---I really appreciate anything you
    might have to add, and no worries if you don't have the time!

    Best wishes from a rainy Portland, Oregon,

    Kristaps

    [1] https://manpages.bsd.lv/history.html
    [2] https://svnweb.freebsd.org/csrg/share/tmac/doc?view=log
    [3] https://lists.opencsw.org/pipermail/buildfarm/2015-March/002433.html