Re: System Panic Makes My Life Easier

On 08/07/2016 01:40 AM, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Ivan Sergio Borgonovo ([email protected]):
>
>> Do you have any other detail? Because this looks fun and weird.
>
> Her recollection was that this involved right-justifying text on the
> line.  The solution was provided, she said, by Steve Savitzky on this
> mailing list on around December 1998.  However, I've just gone through a
> Google search of
>
>    Saoirse site:lists.svlug.org

As said man implement vasprintf and uses it mainly to pipe command lines 
to external programs including troff/groff.
vasprintf is the only place where fp numbers are used but man in current 
implementation never call code that could trigger the use of fp 
instructions.

The error reported by Deirdre seems related to groff.

This I think is as far as I'm willing to get.

Looking at man code was still surprising.
When I thought about fp code in man I actually considered the 
possibility it had to print fp numbers, maybe localized, but I thought 
that a man page should be actually a static document.
I couldn't come up with an actuall example where it could be useful to 
write "In your system pi is actually %f" inside a man pages.

Nevertheless for some yet unknown reasons they had to reimplement 
vasprintf where fp instruction could be used to format floating point 
numbers, but that code never get triggered by man as my expectation.

thanks

-- 
Ivan Sergio Borgonovo
http://www.webthatworks.it http://www.borgonovo.net