On Mon, 17 Jul 2000, Kevin P. Neal wrote:

# On Sat, Jul 15, 2000 at 02:41:30PM -0700, Chuck McManis wrote:
# > Having had some experience at Sun on the "spec" side of the argument I can 
# > assure you that the NetBSD project doesn't have nearly enough resources to 
# > maintain a NetBSD specification. Therefore, unless you can do this for all 
# > man pages (ie spec mode) then it will be no better than guide mode, thus 
# > I'm going to suggest that the answer is guide mode.
# 
# (Sorry, I'm a little behind.)
# 
# How about having man pages list the potential errors that each syscall can
# return, but not give explanations (refer the reader to intro)?

That's not always appropriate, as the generic intro(2) explanation may
cover several cases.  The programmer would then be expected to deduce
exactly what happened (which ain't all bad, mind you -- they're programmers,
after all)...

But aren't there some specific special-cased errors which exist outside
the scope of normalcy?

# Descriptions for some of the errors in the syscall-specific pages wouldn't
# go away, of course.

				--*greywolf;
--
NetBSD, Net Profit.