man was written by John Eaton (jwe@bevo.che.wisc.edu).
He does not maintain man anymore - please do not bother
him with remarks about the current version, which is
rather different from the original one.

man-1.2 was released by Zeyd M. Ben-Halim (zmbenhal@netcom.com).

man-1.3, man-1.4* and man-1.5* were released by Andries Brouwer (aeb@cwi.nl).

In man-1.5 Richard Verhoeven's man2html was added, together with
some scripts by Michael Hamilton. This html stuff is still alpha
(but it works - no negative reports so far).

man-1.6 and versions following were released by Federico Lucifredi (flucifredi@acm.org).

In man-1.6 Eric S. Raymond's browser-handoff functionality was added, with
future minor versions planned to cleanup internationalization and cross
platform support (Cygwin, solaris, and perhaps Win32). A bugfixing campaign
is currently underway.

The current maintainer is Federico Lucifredi (flucifredi@acm.org). 

The current version can usually be found at 
http://primates.ximian.com/~flucifredi/man/ 
a backup distribution site is located at
http://people.fas.harvard.edu/~lucifred/man/
releases are also posted to the Metalab site regularly.

Feedback from distribution packagers is very appreciated. 

There is a very different man program, also derived from
John Eaton's original version (by Graeme W. Wilford)
distributed under the name man_db, with version numbers
like man_db-2.3.10.  Do not confuse the two, they are
mutually incompatible, although they perform nearly the same job.

Man versions are codenamed for Bats, starting with 1.6e. 

Development releases have an 'RC-' suffix followed by the release
candidate number. Versions released under the 'RC' label are not
to be included in stable distributions (and indeed no one has been
so far - do not be the first to screw up!).

