Date: Sat, 11 Aug 2001 17:25:42 -0700 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Sheldon Hearn <sheldonh@starjuice.net> Cc: Michael Robinson <robinson@netrinsics.com>, current@FreeBSD.ORG, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: _sigprocmask in malloc.c causes full file table? Message-ID: <3B75CD06.7E7BA39F@mindspring.com> References: <66435.997574201@axl.seasidesoftware.co.za>
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Sheldon Hearn wrote: > Well, as long as you insist on keeping the problem description to > yourself, the vast hordes of non-programmers at our disposal can't help > much, now can they? But I don't. All you need to do is: 1) Buy a copy of the "Go SOLO 2" book. 2) Read the man pages on the included CDROM side by side with the FreeBSD man pages for the same command. 3) Correct the FreeBSD man pages: a) When they are not as verbose, make them more verbose (case in point) b) When they are different, ask which behaviour is correct for FreeBSD i) Correct the man pages, if FreeBSD matches "Go SOLO 2" ii) Correct the man pages, if FreeBSD does not match "Go SOLO 2", and add an entry to the bugs section iii) Add modified man pages for FreeBSD, and add a comment for future man page editors about the difference being intentional, if FreeBSD has decided on gratuitous incompatability While 3)b)ii rewuires a post to a mailing list and a wait for an answer, and 3)b)iii requires the same, where the answer ends up actually being a policy decision, the rest of them are really no-brainers. > Sometimes, I really wish you'd deliver useful criticism instead of just > sounding impressive. I'm sure there's merit behind what you're saying, > but you're really not helping until you start pointing to a specific > problem. I think that the fact that this person looked at the manual page, and missed _the last line_, and then asked the question, in the context of not knowing that IF they knew how malloc was implemented, and IF they had dereferenced the seemingly least important part of the manual page (by way of organization), they would have been able to find the answer. It's like trying to find something in hierachically organized "GNU info" documentation: redundancy is useful, and try to find "__PRETTY_FUNCTION__" in the "gcc" documentation, when you need to read the man page carefully to find the "info" reference, and then need to run the "info" program instead to find the "real" documentation, and then either know emacs, or linearly tree search through 37 documents (yes, I counted), to find something that should be on the "cpp" man page. > PS: Perhaps 'Go SOLO 2 CDROM' means something that puts your comments > completely into perspective. Yes. It contains all of the POSIX/Single UNIX Specification manual pages, in HTML format, on CDROM: Go SOLO 2 "The Authorized Guide to Version 2 of the Single UNIX Specification" Editor Andrew Josey The Open Group; X/Open, OSF ISBN 0-13-575689-8 US$89.00 Yes, it's expensive; I'm sure it's still expensive on Amazon, though less so. Since FreeBSD has adopted POSIX as its measure of standards compliance (e.g. SVR4 signal restart behavior, SVR4 process group revocation, etc.), it is the gold standard. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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