mandoc — UNIX manpage compiler — history

History of the mandoc toolset

The following resources document mandoc history:

Release notes going back to release 1.9.15, February 18, 2010. Briefly explaining the most important changes in each release in relatively easy terms. Very many changes are not mentioned here.
Development history and porting history going back to the beginning of the project, November 22, 2008. One-line entries for important commits, releases, merges, hackathons and talks. Makes it easy to find out who did what, and when, and when it became available where. However, this is still incomplete, mentioning only a small fraction of all commits, and to keep the size down, the individual entries are extremely terse and technical. Feel free to look up more details and longer explanations about individual entries in the ChangeLog or in CVS.
CVS ChangeLog going back to the beginning of the project. Very technical information of varying quality, strictly chronological. All commits are mentioned, but some messages neglect to mention some changes. Partly terse, partly detailed and verbose. In any case, the ChangeLog is very long — about 50,000 lines and 1.5 MB.
CVS web interface, going back to the beginning of the project. Source code, diffs and commit messages for each source file. The real thing.
Publications and media coverage concerning mandoc
History of UNIX Manpages: a comprehensive overview by Kristaps Dzonsons

History of the names "mandoc" and "mdocml"

Historically, the mandoc toolset used to be called mdocml. That name arose because its original functionality in December 2008 was to convert mdoc(7) input to HTML output ("MDOC to htML"). This original name almost instantly became pars pro toto when mdocml grew a terminal output mode starting on February 20, 2009 and support for the traditional macro language man(7) starting on March 23, 2009. So the program was renamed to mandoc on March 19, 2009, and it was also imported into OpenBSD on April 6, 2009 under the name of mandoc. That's how people became used to referring to the project as mandoc rather than as mdocml.

During the spring of 2014, the main title on the website was changed from mdocml to mandoc to reflect common usage. The old name mdocml continued to be used as a domain name and for the release tarballs up to the 1.14.1 release in February 2017. The last remnants of the old name were finally purged with the 1.14.2 release in July 2017, when the domain name and the name of the release tarballs were also changed to mandoc.

The name mandoc was originally coined by Cynthia Livingston, probably on June 11, 1990, or possibly even earlier, as a command line option to roff, to automatically select the -mdoc or -man macro set depending on the presence of the .Dd or .TH macro in the input file. So it is originally a compound of the three components -m, an, and doc.