The doc/ tree is organized in a particular fashion, and the documents that are part of the FDP are in turn organized in a particular fashion. The aim is to make it simple to add new documentation into the tree and:
make it easy to automate converting the document to other formats;
promote consistency between the different documentation organizations, to make it easier to switch between working on different documents;
make it easy to decide where in the tree new documentation should be placed.
In addition, the documentation tree has to accommodate documentation that could be in many different languages and in many different encodings. It is important that the structure of the documentation tree does not enforce any particular defaults or cultural preferences.
There are two types of directory under doc/, each with very specific directory names and meanings.
Directory: share/
Meaning: Contains files that are not specific to the various translations and encodings of the documentation. Contains subdirectories to further categorize the information. For example, the files that comprise the make(1) infrastructure are in share/mk, while the additional SGML support files (such as the FreeBSD extended DocBook DTD) are in share/sgml.
Directory: lang.encoding/
Meaning: One directory exists for each available translation and encoding of the documentation, for example en_US.ISO8859-1/ and zh_TW.Big5/. The names are long, but by fully specifying the language and encoding we prevent any future headaches should a translation team want to provide the documentation in the same language but in more than one encoding. This also completely isolates us from any problems that might be caused by a switch to Unicode.
This, and other documents, can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/.
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