The working copy is a copy of the FreeBSD repository documentation tree downloaded onto the local computer. Changes are made to the local working copy, tested, and then submitted as patches to be committed to the main repository.
A full copy of the documentation tree can occupy 700 megabytes of disk space. Allow for a full gigabyte of space to have room for temporary files and test versions of various output formats.
Subversion is used to manage the FreeBSD documentation files. It is obtained by installing the Subversion package:
#pkg install subversion
FreeBSD documentation is not just books and articles. Manual
pages for all the commands and configuration files are also part
of the documentation, and part of the FDP's
territory. Two repositories are involved:
doc for the books and articles, and
base for the operating system and manual
pages. To edit manual pages, the base
repository must be checked out separately.
Repositories may contain multiple versions of documentation
and source code. New modifications are almost always made only
to the latest version, called head.
All FreeBSD documents are available for download at https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/doc/
Questions that are not answered by the
documentation may be
sent to <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org>.
Send questions about this document to <freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.org>.