Re: Clean up glibc manual references to "GNU system" (bug 6911)

[Roland McGrath <roland at hack dot frob dot com>]

I don't think the manual should start including the presumption that glibc
is never ported to any non-GNU systems.  It certainly has been before and
it will be again.

I think the wording "GNU systems" is most useful for things applicable to
all underlying systems that would be eligible for blessing as GNU/Foobar,
and clearer than "the GNU system".

For some cases where it says things along the lines of, "The GNU system
never has this constraint," it's the case that we consider the constraint
intolerably stupid.  Hence, an underlying system that had such stupid
contstraints would not become part of a GNU system.  So it seems entirely
appropriate to continue to say, "GNU systems ...".

In cases where it's more of a particular quirk that GNU/Linux and GNU/Hurd
happen to share, then say "GNU/Linux and GNU/Hurd".  Obviously this
distinction is a judgment call.

My real inclination here is to suggest that we make all those cases use one
of several new texinfo macros.  Then we can define those macros in one
place with the chosen wordings, and change the choices later without a lot
of work or risk of inconsistency.  That's of course imperfect since some
wordings are singular and some plural, affecting the grammatical choices
where they are used.  But it seems like the best way both to ensure
consistency and to provide some fairly clear documentation (i.e. @comments
at the macro definition sites) on the conventions being used.


Thanks,
Roland