darling-man/man

man was written by John Eaton (jwe@bevo.che.wisc.edu).
He does not maintain man anymore - please do not bother
him with remarks about the current version, which is
rather different from the original one.

man-1.2 was released by Zeyd M. Ben-Halim (zmbenhal@netcom.com).

man-1.3, man-1.4* and man-1.5* were released by Andries Brouwer (aeb@cwi.nl).

In man-1.5 Richard Verhoeven's man2html was added, together with
some scripts by Michael Hamilton.

man-1.6 and versions following were released by Federico Lucifredi (flucifredi@acm.org).

In man-1.6 Eric S. Raymond's browser-handoff functionality was added, with
future minor versions planned to cleanup internationalization and cross
platform support (Cygwin, solaris, and perhaps Win32). A bugfixing campaign
is currently underway.

The current maintainer is Federico Lucifredi (flucifredi@acm.org). 

The current version can usually be found at 
http://primates.ximian.com/~flucifredi/man/ 
a backup distribution site is located at
http://people.fas.harvard.edu/~lucifred/man/
releases are also posted to the Metalab site regularly.

Feedback from distribution packagers is very appreciated. Patches welcome! 

Man versions are codenamed for bats, starting with 1.6e. 

Development releases have an 'RC-' suffix followed by the release
candidate number. Versions released under the 'RC' label are not
to be included in stable distributions (and indeed no one has been
to date - do not be the first to goof up!).

There is a very different man program, also derived from
John Eaton's original version (by Graeme W. Wilford)
distributed under the name man_db, with version numbers
like man_db-2.3.10.  Do not confuse the two, they are
mutually incompatible, although they perform nearly the same job.