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Re: [PATCH] Fix up LD_* vars behaviour


Hello Nix,

On Fri, Apr 13, 2012 at 7:34 PM, Nix <nix@esperi.org.uk> wrote:
> On 13 Apr 2012, Carlos O'Donell stated:
>> (1) Official standards like http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/
>> - Information about portability is very good.
>> - Unfortunately they do not document glibc specific information.
>>
>> (2) The GNU C Library manual http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/
>> - Traditional manual available in many formats.
>>
>> (3) The man-pages project
>> http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/dir_all_alphabetic.html
>> - Detailed information per interface in man format.
>>
>> Each of (1), (2) and (3) offers our users choice in how they want to
>> view the APIs.
>
> If it wasn't for the GPL/GFDL licensing difference, it would seem
> reasonable to use the manpages for the things not documented in glibc as
> a source for glibc documentation -- the most notable is that (1), (2)

Did you mean "(1), (3)"? (Note by the way, that man-pages coverage of
the pthreads API is far from complete. There's a good set of pages for
some of the basic APIs, but many others are as yet absent. See the
last part of http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/missing_pages.html)

> and Michael's book all document pthreads, while the glibc docs don't
> mention them. (The book's documentation is particularly good: I don't
> feel like I truly understood pthreads until I read it.)

Thanks, that's nice to hear. I sweated some blood over trying to make
some pieces clear. (Thread-specific data springs to mind.)

> But the licensing difference probably means that glibc needs to write
> docs for pthreads from scratch :(

Above, you mentioned the "GPL/GFDL licensing difference", and here you
mention licensing difference again. I'm not sure what you're alluding
to here. (And I'm not sure what the glibc project's stance is with
respect to documentation in licenses other than GFDL.) Anyway, it
prompted me to go do a small analysis of the licenses currently used
in man-pages. As at release 3.38, there are 939 pages, with licenses
as follows:

508 pages under what I call the "verbatim license"
(http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/licenses.html#verbatim I don't
know the origin of the license, or whether it has another name, but
it's the license I tend to favor, and Andries likewise seemed to favor
it.)

325 pages licensed as GPL--specifically GPLv2, either explicitly, or
implicitly (by implication of when the license note was placed).

56 pages licensed under BSD

19 pages under an abridged version of the veratim license.

11 pages explicitly marked as "public domain"

20 other pages under miscellaneous very liberal licenses -- often just
a simple statement like "can be freely redistributed and modified", or
some BSD-like license.

Cheers,

Michael


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