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June 26, 1991
Ralph Barker
/usr/group
2901 Tasman Dr.
Suite 201
Santa Clara, CA 95054

.pp Ralph, recently we spoke concerning the possibility of Berkeley including portions of the /usr/group standards in our documentation. As I said, we would like to use portions of the /usr/group standard as follows: as you know, we (and all UNIX vendors) provide both on-line and hardcopy documentation of the C library functions and system calls supplied with the system. As standards are, in many ways, a more rigorous specification of the current UNIX manual pages, it is a much simpler task to become conformant if we can use portions of them to create our usual style of documentation. This use is in no way intended to replace the standard itself, and my guess is that no more than twenty-five percent of the overall standard would be reproduced. .pp There are two major advantages to the user community in allowing vendors to draw from the standards. First, the manual pages are much more likely to be error-free if they are taken from an exhaustively checked standard. This is not a trivial point; if nothing else, the creation of UNIX standards has proven the difficulty of rigorously defining the syntax of complex functions! Secondly, there is little reason for manual pages to differ greatly if vendors start with the same text. This means that users will see equivalent documentation on a number of vendor's systems. This is especially true in Berkeley's case; since we freely allow redistribution, without additional charge, of our software and documentation, vendors that derive their systems from ours will, in all probability, deliver our documents as theirs. .pp We would, of course, credit /usr/group at the beginning of our printed documentation, and as part of our online documentation. (If possible, please give me a sample of the wording that you would like us to use.) .pp If I can answer any questions, or clarify anything I've said, please let me know. My phone number is 415-642-8524.

Sincerely,
Keith Bostic