From: Richard Stallman <r...@gnu.org>
Subject: Which are the missing manuals?
Date: 1998/11/03
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I would like to update the list of suggested documentation projects
in the GNU task list.  I've included the current list below; if you
see anything that ought to be added, please email me the suggestions.

The ultimate goal is to have free manuals for every aspect of the
system; therefore, this list is not confined to software packages that
are GNU software.  If a free program is used in the GNU system or in
GNU/Linux systems, and it does not now come with all the free manuals
a user would wish for, then we want to include those missing manuals
in this list.

Please see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-doc.html for an
explanation of why free software needs free documentation.

Here is the existing list; the items are in no particular order.

======================================================================
A unified manual for LateX.

A tutorial introduction to Midnight Commander.

A manual for GNU SQL.

A thorough manual for RCS.

A reference manual for Mach.

A reference manual for the GNU Hurd features in GNU libc.

A manual for writing Hurd servers.

A C reference manual.  (RMS made a try at one, which you could start
with).

Reference manuals for C++, Objective C, Pascal, Fortran 77, and Java.

A tutorial manual for the C++ STL (standard template library).

GNU Objective-C Runtime Library Manual; this would be a reference manual
for the runtime library functions, structures, and classes.  Some work
has been done on this job.

Manuals for GNUstep: developer tutorial, developer programming manual,
developer reference manual, and user manual.

A manual for Ghostscript.

A manual for TCSH.

A good free reference manual for Perl.  The free Perl on-line reference
documentation is good, for what it is--a list of functions and a
description of each--but that is not the same as a reference manual.
(Compare, for example, the Emacs Lisp Reference Manual with the
collection of documentation strings of Emacs Lisp functions.)

A good free Perl language tutorial introduction.  The existing Perl
introductions are published with restrictions on copying and
modification, so that they cannot be part of a GNU system.

A manual for PIC (the graphics formatting language).

A book on how GCC works and why various machine descriptions
are written as they are.

A manual for programming applications for X11.

Manuals for various X window managers.

Reference cards for those manuals that don't have them: C
Compiler, Make, Texinfo, Termcap, and maybe the C Library.

Many utilities need documentation, including grep and others.