Re: Revert "Many Pages: Remove references to C89"

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

Hi Brian,

On 3/15/23 17:51, Brian Inglis wrote:
> On 2023-03-15 06:30, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
>> On 3/14/23 06:39, Oskari Pirhonen wrote:
>>> On Mon, Mar 13, 2023 at 13:00:52 +0100, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
>>>>>> <https://port70.net/~nsz/c/c89/c89-draft.txt>
>>>>>> I suggest you download that file, and use a function like this:
>>>>>> $ stdc89() { grep "[[:alpha:]] \**\b$1([[:alnum:]*,. ]*);" /path/to/c89-draft.txt; }
>>>>>> $ stdc89 printf
>>>>>>           int printf(const char *format, ...);
>>>>>>           int printf(const char *format, ...);
> 
>>>>> I gave this a quick spin and it seems to work decently well. So thanks
>>>>> for that.
> 
>>>>> It's still not quite as nice as having C89 mentioned in
>>>>> STANDARDS, and couldn't this be leveraged to fix up the inconsistencies
>>>>> you mentioned earlier?
> 
>>> Looking at the site you linked to for the c89-draft.txt, there's also
>>> C99, C11, and C2x. With yet some more work, it'd be possible to have
>>> equivalent functions for those standards as well. They could even be
>>> combined to create an "std-diff" tool to give, eg, new "str*" functions
>>> introduced in C89 -> C99.
>>> Perhaps such a tool already exists, but I thought it worth mentioning
>>> here in case anyone reading this gets inspired to write it. I've added
>>> it to my (ever growing) TODO list, but don't know when I might get
>>> around to actually giving it a go.
> 
>> Interesting idea.  Sounds fun to do.  I'll check if we can redistribute
>> the drafts of the standard in the Linux man-pages repo.  If so, we could
>> have the standard .txt files in some directory inside the repo, and then
>> have a script that reads those files.
> 
> I have an archive of many drafts including (so far):
> 
>   1.5M Sep 10  1998 N0843-C1999-CD-1998-08.pdf
>   3.4M May  6  2005 N1124-C1999+TC2-CD-2005-05.pdf
>   3.7M Sep  8  2007 N1256-C1999+TC3-CD-2007-09.pdf
>   1.7M Apr 12  2011 N1570-C201X-CD-2011-04.pdf
>   2.3M Oct  9  2017 N2176-C2017-CD-2017-10.pdf
>   6.7M Jan 24 11:37 N3088-C2023-CD1-2023-01.pdf
> 
> which can be downloaded as:
> 
> 	https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n####.pdf

Do you know if we can distribute them?  which license applied to them?
I'm worried that some distros are very strict in what can be distributed
in a package (e.g., Fedora, Debian (main)).  There were issues with
man-pages-posix in the past.

Should we maybe open a separate project iso-c-drafts that installs
drafts of the ISO C standards and maybe some scripts that will be useful
with them?


> 
> Package poppler contains pdftotext which with -layout produces easily searchable 
> text files.

Nice.


Thanks,

Alex