mandoc — UNIX manpage compiler — base system, ports and packages

Availability of the mandoc toolset

When looking for mandoc on your system, be aware that many downstream distributions still use the historical name mdocml for mandoc.

Overview

The following table shows which operating systems provide mandoc, in which way, for how long, and what they use it for. The table is ordered according to how much these systems rely on mandoc, and in case of ties, for how long they have been relying on it.

The columns of the above table have the following meanings:

Base system

The date mandoc was first bundled as part of the base system. On these systems, no installation of mandoc is required, you can use it out of the box. All of these projects have helped to make mandoc better, by providing feedback and advice, bug reports, and patches.

Official package

The date mandoc was first officially packaged. To use mandoc, you do not need to build and install it manually. If it isn't installed by default, the easiest way probably is to install a precompiled package distributed from the official servers of the operating system project. In case that isn't available, you can build the package yourself, using the ports framework or an equivalent mechanism. Please refer to your operation system documentation for instructions how to install packages and/or how to use the ports system.

Unofficial package

The date mandoc was first packaged by a third party, not by the maintainers of the operating system itself. In the past, these third-party maintainers did decent jobs, so it should not be a problem that these ports are unofficial. The last few are however seriously outdated and should be updated before use.

Default formatter

The date mandoc was first used by default to format manual pages. If mandoc is not the default formatter, for some systems, the default formatter is mentioned.

Default searcher

The date mandoc was first used as the default implementation of apropos(1).

Default viewer

The date mandoc was first used as the default implementation of man(1).

Optional viewer

The date an option was first provided for update-alternatives(8) to use the mandoc implementations of man(1) and apropos(1). For systems using mandoc by default, an alternative may be mentioned that is officially provided.

On many other operating systems, for example other Linux distributions, AIX, HP-UX, IRIX, and Solaris, you can use the pkgsrc portable package build system, see the list of supported platforms.

Additional information about mandoc packaging may be available from Repology.

Links to packages

• Alpine — Arch
• Debian: unstable: sid (1.14.5) — testing: bookworm (1.14.5) — stable: bullseye (1.14.5) — oldstable: buster (1.14.4) — stretch (1.13.3)
• Ubuntu: development: Impish Indri (1.14.5) — stable: Hirsute Hippo (1.14.5) — LTS: Focal Fossa (1.14.4) — Bionic Beaver (1.14.3)

Maintenance information

The porting history is also available.

Other platforms

Building mandoc directly from the distribution tarball as described in the INSTALL file and running it has been tested on the following platforms, but a port or package is not currently available and there is no maintainer for these platforms:

• Oracle Solaris Sun OS 5.11.2 (last tested: version 1.14.5 on sun4u sparc by Ingo Schwarze on OpenCSW)
• Sun OS 5.10 (last tested: version 1.14.5 on sun4v sparc by Ingo Schwarze on OpenCSW)
• Sun OS 5.9 (last tested: version 1.14.5 on sun4u sparc by Ingo Schwarze on OpenCSW)
• IBM AIX (last tested: version 1.13.4 by Sevan Janiyan)

Updating the packages for Microsoft Windows is more difficult because newer mandoc requires the mmap(2) function, which is reasonable given that mmap(2) is a POSIX function. Consequently, anybody trying to port mandoc to Windows will have to implement mmap(2) for Windows first. I don't know whether simple code snippets like this one will or will not work.

Before mandoc required mmap(2), it was twice ported to Microsoft Windows, but both ports have long been abandoned:

Cygwin (since December 5, 2012)

mdocml (1.12.2 port)

MinGW (since October 11, 2014)

mandoc (1.13.1 port and pre-built binaries for Microsoft Windows provided by Embedeo Ltd.)

Add or improve mandoc support

If you are interested in building or maintaining another port or consider integrating mandoc into the base system of another operating system, please contact us, such that we can provide help and keep you updated regarding new releases.

Copyright © 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2023 Ingo Schwarze, $Date: 2023/11/15 17:24:58 $