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Re: [PATCH] Fix up LD_* vars behaviour


On 13 Apr 2012, Michael Kerrisk told this:

> 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)"?

*ouch* yes. I'm typoing everywhere today: obviously I should just
retreat into a shell and pull it over me until I can type straight.

(I checked that twice, too.)

>                          (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)

Now *that* page is worth keeping track of.

(if I ever learn enough troff that I can do more than cargo-cult man
pages, I might try writing some of those missing bits.)

>> 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.)

Well, your effort was not wasted. I can't say I left it liking pthreads
to any great degree, but at least I understood it enough to dislike it
for good reasons (and to fix bugs in threaded programs). TLPI has
supplanted APUE on my shelves now. Before it was published I had
despaired of anyone writing anything as clear and useful as APUE ever
again, so thank you!

>> 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.

Well, glibc's documentation is GFDL. man-pages is (mostly?) not. And
man-pages's pages are mostly written by multiple people. So direct
transfer of text from man-pages into the glibc documentation seems
likely to be difficult at best.

> 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.)

At first sight, this looks GFDL-compatible, but I'm not a lawyer nor
have I ever played one even in a dream, let alone on TV. If it *is*
GFDL-compatible, then one-way copying into glibc's info pages may be
possible (if the formatting and stylistic differences between man-pages
and glibc's documentation are easy enough to compensate for for that to
be worthwhile, of course).

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

Probably much harder to copy into glibc :(

-- 
NULL && (void)


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