Re: the Linux man-pages as an educational tool

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Subject: Re: the Linux man-pages as an educational tool
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Hi Alex,

At 2026-08-03T01:42:57+0200, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> > > > Date: 2026-08-02 16:27:21-0700
> > > > From: Collin Funk <[email protected]>
> > > > I can't help but wonder of what happens in WG 14 rejects this
> > > > controversial, as obvious by this thread, change. Will the
> > > > man-pages changes be reverted?
> >=20
> > > > Or will we slowly watch them document personal
> > > > preferences instead of existing standards?
> >=20
> > BTW, as I showed in another subthread, strncpy(3) did contain
> > opinionated comments well before I was involved.  If you're really
> > going to accuse me of that, better make sure you get the history
> > right.
>=20
> Oh, and while at it, please also read my review of glibc's own
> opinionated and bogus documentation about string truncation.

I don't think this rhetorical tactic is a sound one.  You are implying
that because Collin (and perhaps others) are not on record as having
already consistently opposed editorializing in the glibc manual, or in
the Linux man-pages prior to your stewardship, that they are hypocrites.

First, that's not necessarily true.  Who's read every word of either
work?  Who had already done so 5, 10, or 20 years ago?

A charge of hypocrisy can only stick well if you can establish that your
interlocutors _endorsed_ the editorializing contemporaneously when it
was done by someone else, but are refusing to endorse yours.

But there are more fundamental reasons to conduct this struggle on
different grounds, which are that (1) people get to change their minds;
and (2) people get to raise defects even if they are old ones.

Thus, if you feel justified in "relitigating", in Joseph's term, the
ANSI C Committee's decision in the late 1980s to scotch the memory.h
header file, then Collin gets to "relitigate" past editorializing by
(I guess?) Michael Kerrisk in the Linux man-pages, or by the glibc
authors in their Texinfo manual.

Thus, here you have handed Collin an easy annulment of your point: he
can simply say, "well I object to those, too".

Every generation of engineers bears a responsibility to remake the world
anew.  That which endures does so because its quality is re-tested and
re-proved by successive cohorts of humans growing up and running
straight at it with their freshly trained minds and novel phenomena of
recent invention.  When an artifact persists because it's protected from
the bratty young philistines by older people who, as William F. Buckley
put it, stand athwart history and yell "stop!", it fails to prove its
continued utility: it stops being an engineered product and becomes an
antiquarian one.

Regards,
Branden

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