[Bug 217291] librt empty, man pages should not tell users to link with -lrt

bugzilla-daemon
2023-04-05T05:02:35Z

--- Comment #2 from Janne Blomqvist (blomqvist.janne@gmail.com) ---
(In reply to Sam James from comment #1)
> It depends on one's libc (non-glibc implementations are free to need it
> still) rather than being obsolete altogether.
>
> Ultimately, a configure test is needed.

I'm not sure the man-pages project really concerns itself with non-glibc
libc's. Of course you're right that a project that wants to be portable to
multiple libc's will need configure tests (or equivalent). But that doesn't
mean that a project that aims to document how to use glibc shouldn't tell users
how to use it.

My suggestion is that the man pages I mentioned above should have languages
like clock_gettime and friends already have. That is, from
https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/clock_gettime.3.html :

Link with -lrt (only for glibc versions before 2.17).

Or in the current repo:

.SH LIBRARY
Standard C library
.RI ( libc ", " \-lc ),
since glibc 2.17
.PP
Before glibc 2.17,
Real-time library
.RI ( librt ", " \-lrt )

(Not sure why one needs to explicitly tell to link with libc (-lc) and thus how
this is an improvement over the older version published on the web page (and in
most Linux distros man pages), but I digress)