Re: the Linux man-pages as an educational tool

Sam James <[email protected]> writes:

> Alejandro Colomar <[email protected]> writes:
>
>> Hi Collin,
>>
>>> 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? Or will we slowly watch them document personal
>>> preferences instead of existing standards?
>>
>> This patch set is quite independent of the standard.  It documents a
>> header file that has been provided since forever in glibc and most other
>> POSIX-ish systems, so changes to the standard are unlikely to have any
>> effects.  I've clarified this extensively.  If you want to discourage me
>> from applying the change, you should rather bring up technical reasons.
>>
>> This passive-aggressive message is not something that will have the
>> desired effects you could possibly reach with technical arguments.
>
> I didn't read it as passive-aggressive, but I will say that I think
> you've gone a bit hard in the responses to Collin in this subthread, and
> I think the fact you sent several followup emails to yourself indicates
> perhaps things got heated in the moment.

The last sentence was probably a bit rude, sorry about that. However, I
think a reasonable third party can understand my frustration. Almost
everyone who has responded in this thread has been against the change,
and have spent time writing their rationale. They simply receive a
response that can be summarized as "strncpy and friends are confusing",
or pointed to a much less commonly used man page which does not align
with standards for historic reasons, or told they are not rationalizing
enough.

I no longer consider this thread a productive use of time, so I won't
respond to further messages. I am happy enough to fix the SYNOPSIS of my
man pages locally like this:

    $ git grep -lF '<memory.h>' \
        | xargs -n 1 sed -i 's|<memory.h>.*|<string.h>|g'

Hopefully distributions consider doing the same.

Collin