Re: [PATCH] Fix up LD_* vars behaviour

[Mike Frysinger <vapier at gentoo dot org>]

On Thursday 26 April 2012 12:34:43 Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
>    On 4/19/2012 7:30 PM, David Miller wrote:
>    > If the glibc documentation were complete and widely used, you could
>    > say that the man-pages are secondary.
> 
> So lets make the glibc documentation complete and widley used.  That
> is the primary documentaion for glibc after all, and the most
> comprehensive (the man-pages project doesn't document many many
> aspects of glibc).

complete, sure.  (more) widely used requires outputting man pages.  i thought 
there were tools to do this from info sources ?

> One could maybe get a copyright disclaimer from man-pages folks, or
> better yet the Open Group (or IEEE) for POSIX to incoperate the parts
> that are missing into the glibc documentation.

i don't think the POSIX side is feasible (they allow redistribution of content 
just fine, but they still retain the copyrights) ... you can see this here:
	http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/man-pages/man-pages-posix/
(also, i'd note those are out of date -- no release for 2008)

however, even if we got that disclaimer, it doesn't address the more important 
issue: documentation for glibc-specific interfaces.  with POSIX interfaces, we 
generally have clear space in what we can break, and users can see what they 
may rely on by reading the spec themselves (i.e. avoiding things not 
mentioned, or clearly labeled "undefined" or "implementation defined").

with glibc-specific functions that aren't documented in the glibc manual, it's 
a harder sell.  getting disclaimers from the respective man page contributors 
to fill out the official documentation on these interfaces would be a good thing.  
all we have to go on otherwise is the code, any comments they include (some 
prototypes in headers are better documented than others), and what the 
original contributors hashed out in the respective mailing lists.
-mike

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