Re: [PATCH v2] Remove union wait (was: Re: Deprecate union wait and remove support from wait functions [BZ #19613])

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

All the code substance of the change looks fine to me (separate from the
high-level issue of whether to do this change now).

> --- a/NEWS
> +++ b/NEWS
> @@ -21,6 +21,10 @@ Version 2.24
>  * The readdir_r and readdir64_r functions have been deprecated.  It is
>    recommended to use readdir and readdir64 instead.
>  
> +* The type union wait has been removed.  

I would put some punctuation of some sort around the two-word type name.
Perhaps 'union wait'.

> It was obsoleted by 4.3+BSD in the
> +  early 1990s.  

This is inaccurate.  'union wait *' was the sole type for wait and wait3 in
4.3BSD.  As of 4.4-BSD-Lite2 (1995), the functions' prototypes used 'int *'
(so there would be a compiler warning passing 'union wait *' to them, but
it would still work), the 'union wait' type was still present, and the W*
macros worked with either (by virtue of a sloppy cast in the macros).

Looking at https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/sys/sys/wait.h AFAICT
FreeBSD's trunk version dropped 'union wait' entirely in 2002.  I'm not
sure what the first FreeBSD release version was that lacked it.

> Application code should use the int type instead of union
> +  wait.

Perhaps it's simpler just to say that it's been obsolete ever since the
standardization of POSIX.1 and rarely used "for 20 years or more" or
something like that.

> diff --git a/manual/process.texi b/manual/process.texi
> index aa59040..25bdb8e 100644
> --- a/manual/process.texi
> +++ b/manual/process.texi
> @@ -763,53 +763,17 @@ signal number of the signal that caused the child process to stop.
>  
>  
>  @node BSD Wait Functions
> -@section BSD Process Wait Functions
> +@section BSD Process Wait Function

This should probably be more thoroughly rewritten, probably dropping the
section and describing wait3 as obsolete just alongside wait4.


Thanks,
Roland