Re: patching suffixes(7) (was: groff 1.23.0.rc2 status report)

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

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Hi Branden,

On 12/20/22 04:40, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> At 2022-12-19T20:10:25+0100, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
>> On 12/19/22 17:59, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
>>> [dropping Deri and groff@]
>>>
>>> At 2022-12-19T17:39:37+0100, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
>>>> Would you mind sending a patch that I can apply with git?  I could
>>>> manually edit the file you attached, but I'm feeling lazy for that
>>>> :\
>>>
>>> Damn.  Our lazinesses are duelling.  :P
>>
>> :P
>>
>> I actually wonder how producing such a diff was simpler than just
>> copying the output of git diff...
> 
> I don't find "diff -u <tab-completion>{,.new}" very difficult.
> 
> (I often do that in repos that I mostly read as opposed to contributing
> to; that way my half-baked ideas don't get in the way of a rebase pull.
> Branching doesn't solve that problem, and if I git-stash something in
> such a repo I'm likely to forget about it, or not think to check there.)

Hmmm, can make sense.  (I branch for such occasions.)  (stash && rebase-pull && 
stash-pop is also common, but that's for repos in which I work more often and 
don't have to pull tons of changes.) :)

> 
>> BTW, I still plan releasing man-pages-6.02 in a two days, and feel
>> confident enough about the string changes (modulo a few tweaks that
>> I'll apply) to ship them in it.  If you have any comments about them,
>> please voice them :)
> 
> I have weak preference for the name "string_copying(7)" over
> "string_copy(7)", but leaving the summary-description the same.
> 

I prefer it too.  string_copy was for when this page was going to substitute the 
other ones, so I wanted it to have a name resembling them.  But now I like 
"copying" more.  So, done, and pushed.  A new page is born.

> Apart from that I have no comments, apart from encouraging you in your
> effort to reform common practice to something less sloppy.

Thanks :)

> I think you
> will get pushback from people who (1) don't appreciate how horrible the
> C string library is, in part because they have mazed themselves with the
> notion that the engineers at the Bell Labs CSRC were all infallible
> giants who deigned to walk among us mortals for a while; and (2) would
> rather wait until some total replacement solution comes along, which of
> course they would oppose with at least much passion.
> 
> Nevertheless, once in a while they'll make good points.  Take that
> opportunity to anneal the quality of your initiative.
> 
> The standard I/O library is a disaster, too.  Much more esteemed people
> than I have made this point, such as Korn and Vo, who presented their
> case at USENIX in 1991.[1]  Of course, they did the smart thing back
> then and didn't FLOSS-license it, possibly under direction from AT&T
> management.  Thanks to that shrewd advice, sfio.h stormed to success and
> ubiquity instead of being nearly forgotten.

That's why I went for public domain for the APIs and basic implementations, and 
BSD-3-Clause for the string_copying(7) page.  I'd like it to be as widespread as 
possible.

However, my own library implementation is LGPL-3.0-or-later, as couldn't be 
otherwise.

> 
> But even a permissive license may well have not been enough.  The
> average programmer will happily drink from a pool of dioxin as long as
> it is a familiar one. >
>>> was David Wheeler (no, the other one)
>>
>> Didn't know of the other David Wheeler.
> 
> Well, David J. Wheeler (computer scientist) passed away in 2004, so
> possibly David A. Wheeler (computer scientist) gets mistaken for him
> less often now.
> 
> I've been making this joke for years.  It hasn't worked once.  Like the
> average programmer, I learn nothing from this.
> 
>> According to wikipedia, pkg-config(1)'s initial release is also from
>> 2000.  So, yes, probably it wasn't widely known at the time.
> 
> It was an innocent time, when packaging was still young and exciting,

I need to learn packaging some day.  I should learn Debian packaging to package 
this new library...

> and before JavaScript people getting paid a lot to work in e-commerce
> decided they could do it better than everyone else.
> 
> Regards,
> Branden
> 
> [1] https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall97/cs595/sfio.ps

Cheers,
Alex

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

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