the Linux man-pages as an educational tool
Bruno Haible
bruno@clisp.org
Mon Aug 3 12:35:06 GMT 2026
Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> This is just a case where educating on the current standards is done by
> 1) documenting at the bottom of the manual what the standard says, and
The standard-compliant #include statement should be documented in the SYNOPSIS,
not at the bottom of the man page.
> 2) recommending to ignore it because it's bad. When the standards are
> bad, this is appropriate course.
Which functions are "bad"? It's not up to you (single person) to decide this.
Rather, poll among the libc implementors, and if a majority says a function
is "bad", then mark it as bad.
That's basically how it went with 'gets': The community realized it is a bad
function, then the implementors started to withdraw it.
And even there, look at several implementors, not only at a single one. For
instance, NetBSD considers uselocale() to be "bad" and therefore does not
implement it. That's a single-implementor opinion, not a majority.
Bruno
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