[ On Monday, October 1, 2001 at 09:14:05 (-0700), Michael Lyle wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: pipe(2) and invalid fildes
>
> I disagree a little bit on on this point.
> 
> When writing code in userland, I view man pages as the -requirements-
> that the system call will conform to.  It's really nice to know that
> "system call a doesn't return N, but may in the future", so that if
> that case is relevent it can be appropriately trapped.

If you want to know those kinds of things then you should not be reading
the manual pages for a given implementation, but rather standards
documents, programming guides, or the like.

Manual pages (should) document the implementation.  If there's a problem
in the implementation that can/should be fixed, but for some reason
won't be fixed right away then it should be documented in the BUGS
secition of the relevant manual page(s).

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>     <woods@robohack.ca>
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