On 11/3/07, Brian Ginsbach <ginsbach@netbsd.org> wrote:
> 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 those pages is unfortunately out of date.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.
>

I had to use the freebsd man pages and that's why I asked why netbsd
didn't have them.  For something with a configuration syntax as obtuse
as ntpd, a man page would seem absolutely necessary.  ;)