Re: Manual pages from glibc-doc

[Xavier Leroy <Xavier.Leroy@inria.fr>]

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Hello Alex,

On Thu, May 18, 2023 at 8:23 PM Alex Colomar <alx.manpages@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello Xavier,
>
> I see there are some manual pages in the glibc-doc package.
> Most of glibc's manual pages are part of the Linux man-pages
> project.  I would be interested in absorbing the ones present
> in the glibc-doc package into the Linux man-pages project.
>
> That would probably remove whatever overhead there is in
> maintaining a separate package just for a few manual pages.
>
> Would you like that?
>

Well, I wrote those man pages a long time ago, in the late 1990's, to
document the first version of the LinuxThreads library.  The LinuxThreads
code was later completely rewritten by Drepper and Molnar at Redhat (for
the better!), so I forgot about the man pages, and did not know they were
still distributed as part of the glibc-doc package.

I hope the pages have been maintained and updated by the Glibc team,
because the first version that I wrote was fairly specific to the
LinuxThreads v1 implementation and its limitations, and is probably useless
today.  Likewise, the POSIX Threads standard changed quite a bit in the
last 25 years, with new functions that are implemented in Glibc but lack a
man page in glibc-doc.

To answer your question:
- I don't think it's a good idea to take these man pages "as is" and drop
them in the man-pages project, because they are probably obsolete and
incomplete.
- However, if you or others would like to use these man pages as a starting
point for a comprehensive, up-to-date and maintained documentation for
POSIX Threads functions in Linux, you're most welcome.
- In both cases, I'd like my name and e-mail address to be removed from the
man pages, as I no longer support them.

Kind regards,

- Xavier Leroy






>
> Cheers,
> Alex
>
> --
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