Re: [PATCH] man-pages.7: Document CAVEATS section

Ingo Schwarze
2022-07-26T13:55:02Z

Hi Alejandro,

Alejandro Colomar wrote on Tue, Jul 26, 2022 at 02:08:18PM +0200:

> CAVEATS is an interesting section from OpenBSD.

It is no doubt nice when credit is given to OpenBSD,
but in this case, it happens to be undeserved. ;-)

I see the following early uses of ".SH CAVEATS":

* 4.2BSD execve(2), released September 1983, author unknown
* 4.3BSD-Tahoe patch(1), released June 1988, author: Larry Wall
* 4.3BSD-Reno amd(8), released June 1990, author: Jan-Simon Pendry
* 4.4BSD strftime(3), released June 1993, author: Arnold Robbins
* 4.4BSD gzip(1), released June 1993, author (unsure) Jean-loup Gailly ?
* 4.4BSD mount_kernfs(8), released June 1993, author: Jan-Simon Pendry

The first instance of ".Sh CAVEATS" i found is:

* 4.4BSD-Lite1 realpath(3), released April 1994, author Keith Bostic

It doesn't look as if the UC CSRG used CAVEATS in additional files.

Standardization was decided in NetBSD during a discussion
on <tech-userlevel@netbsd.org> leading to this commit:

/src/share/misc/mdoc.template revision 1.6
date: 2002-07-10 09:45:18 +0000; author: yamt; state: Exp; lines: +2 -1;
add CAVEATS section. discussed on tech-userlevel.

The login name "yamt" belongs to YAMAMOTO Takashi.

It was then quickly picked up in OpenBSD by Jason McIntyre.

So the section has a tradition of almost 40 years and has been
standardized in *BSD for about two decades, even though it was
not originally a BSD invention.

Yours,
Ingo