From owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Fri Jun 13 09:45:13 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3C9A137B401 for ; Fri, 13 Jun 2003 09:45:13 -0700 (PDT) Received: from bluejay.mail.pas.earthlink.net (bluejay.mail.pas.earthlink.net [207.217.120.218]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 95AAA43FDF for ; Fri, 13 Jun 2003 09:45:10 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from tlambert2@mindspring.com) Received: from user-38lc0hv.dialup.mindspring.com ([209.86.2.63] helo=mindspring.com) by bluejay.mail.pas.earthlink.net with asmtp (SSLv3:RC4-MD5:128) (Exim 3.33 #1) id 19Qrfi-0007QU-00; Fri, 13 Jun 2003 09:45:03 -0700 Message-ID: <3EE9FF4C.EB3630C@mindspring.com> Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2003 09:43:56 -0700 From: Terry Lambert X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.79 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Bill Moran References: <3EE8C1F4.7000800@potentialtech.com> <3EE9D11C.1040008@potentialtech.com> <3EE9F282.4020806@potentialtech.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-ELNK-Trace: b1a02af9316fbb217a47c185c03b154d40683398e744b8a4eb5074c55638f5c3a8c093f61c818662548b785378294e88350badd9bab72f9c350badd9bab72f9c cc: chat@freebsd.org cc: fcash@sd73.bc.ca Subject: Re: Looking for holes in the docs to fill in X-BeenThere: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Non technical items related to the community List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2003 16:45:13 -0000 If anyone in this thread is still interested, there's actually a pretty big job to do in the documentation department, but it's more real technical writing, as it involves looking at code. Specifically, it would be nice to go through the manual pages relative to the implementation, and make sure that they correspond. But that's not all. It would be useful to go through the online SuSv3 manual pages, and effectively make the manual pages correspond (they can't be identical for the usual copyright reasons, so this requires creativitiy). Then add two sections to each page: "DEVIATIONS FROM THE STANDARD" and "BSD EXTENSIONS". This would make it *very* clear to program writers what they should be using to get standards compliant programs, and what cross-platform behaviours they should and should not expect, and what local extensions are available, if you know that you prefer performance (or BSD legacy with potential performance loss!) over portability. Personally, I would also refer them to a "bsd_extensions" man page as well, and that page would suggest strongly that any code that was written using a BSD extension wrapper it with appropriate #ifdef's, for portability's sake. The manifest constant to use is up to whoever, but "BSD_VISIBLE" and "FREEBSD" are likely candidates (with whatever underscores they have this week). -- Terry