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Re: [PATCH] Fix up LD_* vars behaviour
On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 11:18 AM, Joseph S. Myers
<joseph@codesourcery.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 20 Apr 2012, Michael Kerrisk wrote:
>
>> But at that point the question becomes: who should write and review
>> the man pages (and what legitimacy does that documentation have)?
>
> The man pages should be written by people interested in writing them, of
> course. ?In accordance with the GNU Coding Standards, man pages are
> secondary to the Texinfo documentation for GNU software. ?They should be
> read as independent observations about the library rather than a contract
> with applications.
And there is the crux of the matter: given the state of the
documentation, how do users of glibc determine what the contract is,
for the many existing nonstandard interfaces that are present in
glibc?
> Independent observations are useful; differences
> between those observations and the GNU manuals (and between either and
> POSIX) can help point out areas that may be tricky or controversial.
>
> If in doubt about a particular point, feel free to raise it on libc-alpha
> - or file a bug in Bugzilla if you think it's a bug. ?I hope that anything
> the man pages describe as being a bug in current glibc also has an
> associated open bug in Bugzilla.
I am not sure whether all things under BUGS in man3 have a bug in the
glibc bugzilla, but as you've been gardening a lot lately, I know
you'll have see that I raised a lot of bugs over the years...
--
Michael Kerrisk
Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
Author of "The Linux Programming Interface"; http://man7.org/tlpi/