Re: [PATCH 3/3] manual: Add new header and standards annotations.

[Zack Weinberg <zackw at panix dot com>]

On 12/06/2016 05:57 AM, Rical Jasan wrote:
> As food for thought, since nobody has suggested alternatives yet, and
> I've been examining all the variations in current use, what about:

If this list is going to appear somewhere in the manual, it would be
easier to understand if it was organized first topically and then
chronologically.

ISO C90, C95, C99, C11, TRs/TSes
POSIX.1/2 1990, 1992, 1993, 1995, 2001 (XSI), 2008 (XSI)
LFS (2004?)

XPG3 (1990), XPG4(.2) (1992?), UNIX 98 (1998)
BSD 4.3 (1986), 4.4 (1993)

undated: GNU, Linux, BSD, System V, Sun

"BSD" includes both things that are really, really old (like a lot of
the networking APIs) and things that are brand new (like explicit_bzero,
if I ever manage to get that approved).  Similarly Linux, BSD, System V,
Sun.

"SVID" refers to a specific document, I think equivalent to one of the
XPG series, but we were using it as a catch-all for "not-standardized
thing from the System V lineage", so let's rename it "System V".

I don't think tracing history back before 1990 is terribly useful.  I'm
not even sure we're doing anyone any favors by preserving all those
pre-2001 POSIX feature selection knobs.

> ISO/IEC TR 27431-2:2010
> ISO/IEC TS 18661-1:2014
> ISO/IEC TS 18661-4:2015

Nobody's going to have any idea what the heck these are.  It's not wrong
to give them their official ISO/IEC numbers, but we need the short
titles as well.

> XSI POSIX.1-2001
> XSI POSIX.1-2008

XSI is an add-on module for POSIX, so it should be named *after* the
date (POSIX.1-2001 XSI, POSIX.1-2008 XSI)

> Sun is a lame attempt; there are all of Sun, SunOS, and SUNRPC in
> current use.  Suggestions welcome.

"Sun" is a good catch-all term for things invented by Sun Microsystems.
We're trying (painfully slowly) to get rid of the Sun RPC code, but
there will still be other Sun-derived stuff after it's gone.

> There is also "IPv6 Basic API", which should probably be an RFC or
> something.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3493 "Basic Socket Interface Extensions
for IPv6", probably.

> POSIX.1g is also used.

There were a whole bunch of documents named POSIX.1[a-z]; they were
folded into the base standard in either 1995 or 2001, and I'd recommend
we just document the point where that happened (so, treat .1g as another
name for .1-2001).

zw