Re: [PATCH] memmem.3: Added list of known systems where this is available

[Alejandro Colomar <alx.manpages@gmail.com>]

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Hi Andrew!

On 11/10/22 13:58, Andrew Clayton wrote:
> On Thu, 10 Nov 2022 12:36:47 +0100
> Alejandro Colomar <alx.manpages@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Although for the page itself I wouldn't add the dates, I think it's useful to
>> include the years of those releases in the commit message (when known).
>>
>> musl 0.9.7 is from 2012.
>> FreeBSD 6 is from 2005.
>> OpenBSD 5.4 is from 2013.
>>
>> Please include that, if you don't mind.
> 
> Will do.
> 
> [...]
> 
>> For the commit message, it's interesting to note macOS and Bionic, for
>> speleology purposes.  However, I'm opposed to adding them to the page itself
>> because of the following:
>>
>> -  macOS is not free software.  I refuse to reference nonfree software on this
>> project.
> 
> In that case you might want to remove references to the following (as
> it looked OK to reference proprietary UNIX)

There's no rule.  It can be OK; let me explain a little bit, at least my 
opinion, which I didn't consult to previous maintainers, but seems to be 
somewhat aligned.

If someone reading the list has a different opinion, please manifest yourselves. 
  If you do, also feel free to do so.  I'm not strongly convinced of it; it's 
just the guideline I follow.

> 
> SunOS, Solaris, Irix, AIX, DG/UX, HP-UX, OSF/1, Digital UNIX, Tru64,
> SCO (definitely SCO!), and MacOS X (and probably others I missed).
> 
> Personally I wouldn't, they're a part of Linux's history... and these
> days largely interesting for historical purposes.

So, yes, some decades ago, Linux and other FOSS OSes weren't as widespread as 
they are now, and it was quite useful to know what Solaris and other UNIXes did. 
  Also, some free OSes descend or took features from some of those proprietary OSes.

However, today it's possible to ignore that those exist, for most purposes.

So, as a rough guideline, I wouldn't document macOS providing a function 
available in all main free OSes, but I would document something like the nasty 
thing they did with pivot_root(2)[1], which can hurt us free world programmers.

Current practice with references to macOS seems to be consistent with that:

$ grep -rni macos
man3/termios.3:1166:FreeBSD and NetBSD and HP-UX and MacOS ignore the value of
man3/fopen.3:84:the beginning of the file, but for Android/BSD/MacOS, the
man3/remquo.3:63:.\" MacOS 10: return 7 bits
man3/pthread_attr_setstacksize.3:55:.\" e.g., MacOS
Changes.old:16031:            On MacOS X at least, pthread_attr_setstacksize(3) 
can fail
Changes.old:49338:            MacOS has the ambiguous "The stream is positioned 
at the end of
$

Those few cases refer to incompatibilities in macOS that might break otherwise 
fine programs.

And as you said, I'm not removing any existing references, for historical purposes.


[1]: <https://github.com/nginx/unit/issues/737>


> 
> Cheers,
> Andrew

Cheers,
Alex

-- 
<http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>

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