On Sat, Nov 03, 2007 at 03:20:31PM +0000, Christos Zoulas wrote:
> In article <Pine.NEB.4.64.0711030951480.2006@glacier.reedmedia.net>,
> Jeremy C. Reed <reed@reedmedia.net> wrote:
> >On Sat, 3 Nov 2007, matthew sporleder wrote:
> >
> >> Is there a reason the ntp.conf man page is missing from my netbsd
> >> system and not available on man.netbsd.org?
> >
> >We don't have an ntp.conf man page. The upstream doesn't provide an 
> >ntp.conf man page.
> >
> >The documentation is provided by the upstream as HTML. See 
> >/usr/share/doc/html/ntp/
> >/usr/share/doc/html/ntp/index.html
> >
> >Any volunteers to create and maintain mandoc versions? (Maybe Debian or 
> >other has them?)
> 
> Ntpd had perfectly good man pages until someone decided that html
> was the way to go and removed them. This is a pity, because it is
> simple to generate good html from *roff, and there are tools to do
> that, but it is difficult to generate *roff from html. I tried to
> extract the information from html into man pages when we first
> imported ntp4, but that was a long time ago and the information in
> those pages is unfortunately out of date. If you agree with me that
> ntpd should have man pages, please send mail to the maintainers and
> let them know. Perhaps if enough people speak up they will change
> their mind!
> 

I thought that they had recently re-added man pages.  I seem to recall
a discussion on ntp-hackers to that effect.   Maybe Frank Kardel
could shed some additional light on this.

I also seem to recall that the man pages that were part of the
distribution where not in sync with the html documentation.  I
think this was why they were dropped.

I do know that David Mills is only going to create his upstream
documents in html.  I think the ntp.org folks were having the same
problem generating something from html.

I do see that Brian Utterback (Sun developer who also works with
ntp.org) has very recently created some ntp man pages for OpenSolaris.
The can be found here <http://opensolaris.org/os/project/ntp/files/>
as pdf files for review.

Also it looks like FreeBSD generates their own man pages by
transcribing the html.

Brian