Re: Request for volunteers

[Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx>]

On Sun, Jun 30, 2013 at 03:29:14PM -0700, idunham@lavabit.com wrote:
> > What might be better for the near future is to get the POSIX man pages
> > project updated to match POSIX-2008+TC1 so that users of musl who want
> 
> I seem to recall running across the request for this; IIRC, the
> maintainer said he'd wait until TOG uploaded an nroff tarball for
> POSIX2008.

This sounds unlikely. My understanding was that the people who
released the "3p" man pages generated them from the published POSIX
spec (Issue 6) with the blessing of the Open Group to license them
acceptably for distribution. I don't think the Open Group gave them
nroff files though...

> The linux man pages project may focus on glibc, but they document
> differences in other Linux libc versions; it might make sense to try
> sending them patches that document musl differences.
> Besides avoiding a new project, this would be more convenient for those
> targetting multiple systems (eventually, a developer on Debian or RHEL
> would  see it while reading the man page...).

I agree this would be ideal, but I think it would require convincing
them that musl is noteworthy for inclusion in the man pages (where,
for example, uClibc, dietlibc, klibc, etc. do not seem to be
considered noteworthy). I'm not sure if we would face political
obstacles here, but we could certainly try.

> Of course, this doesn't cover the man pages for BSD-specific functions.

I think there are only a very few BSD functions in musl which are not
also in glibc. Writing man pages for these, or copying and editing the
BSD ones, would not be a huge task.

Rich