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Message-ID: <20130707000324.GU29800@brightrain.aerifal.cx> Date: Sat, 6 Jul 2013 20:03:24 -0400 From: Rich Felker <dalias@...ifal.cx> To: musl@...ts.openwall.com Cc: "Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)" <mtk.manpages@...il.com> Subject: Re: Re: Linux manpages (was Re: Request for volunteers) On Sun, Jul 07, 2013 at 12:04:04AM +0100, Justin Cormack wrote: > > > On a slightly related note, would you be interested in patches for the > > > Linux manpages briefly documenting places where musl differs from glibc > > > (in the NOTES section, along the same lines as the notes about > libc4/libc5)? > > > > Historically, man-pages has primarily documented glibc + syscalls, but > > there's nothing firm about that. It's more been about limited time > > resources and the fact that glibc is the most widely used libc. I'd > > have no objection to musl-specific notes in the man-pages. Perhaps a > > patch to libc(7) would be a good place to start. I'm not sure how much effort would be involved. My ideal outcome would be for the man pages to evolve to document what applications can _portably_ expect from the interfaces, with appropriate notes on caveats where certain libc versions or kernel versions give you less-than-conforming behavior, and where nonstandard extensions are available. However my feeling is that this would be a very big project and I'm not sure if Michael would want to go in that direction. I do think it would greatly improve the quality of Linux software development, though. > The man(2) section is rather glibc specific and makes the syscall details > rather subsidiary. I will try to send some patches if these would be > welcome. I think it's an error to have anything glibc-specific in section 2 of the manual, which should be documenting the kernel, not userspace. What would be useful in the section 2 man pages is to document where the syscall is insufficient to provide POSIX semantics, which are left to userspace to provide. Such section 2 pages could then have corresponding section 3 pages that document the library behavior. Rich
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