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Branden Robinson" , Arsen =?utf-8?Q?Arsenovi=C4=87?= , "Maciej W. Rozycki" , Paul Eggert , linux-man@vger.kernel.org, bug-gnulib@gnu.org, libc-alpha@sourceware.org Subject: Re: the Linux man-pages as an educational tool In-Reply-To: <87h5lb9u8d.fsf@gentoo.org> References: <20260802000833.zpu27l7ibvrbouna@illithid> <87cxw1s58a.fsf@gmail.com> <87ik5sunm7.fsf@aarsen.me> <20260802231058.o7gud4bd7co2nbhv@illithid> <875x1sp0h2.fsf@gmail.com> <87h5lb9u8d.fsf@gentoo.org> Date: Mon, 03 Aug 2026 19:39:43 -0700 Message-ID: <8733wusj68.fsf@gmail.com> User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Precedence: bulk X-Mailing-List: linux-man@vger.kernel.org List-Id: List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Sam James writes: > Alejandro Colomar writes: > >> Hi Collin, >> >>> Date: 2026-08-02 16:27:21-0700 >>> From: Collin Funk >>> >> [...] >>> >>> 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 '' \ | xargs -n 1 sed -i 's|.*||g' Hopefully distributions consider doing the same. Collin