Subject: library man pages
To: None <tech-misc@NetBSD.ORG, tech-userlevel@NetBSD.ORG>
From: Perry E. Metzger <perry@piermont.com>
List: tech-misc
Date: 01/10/1998 13:16:32
As pr-4209 indirectly points out, we have a general problem in our man
pages. Section 3 man pages for functions in libraries other than libc
do not specify what library a function is in, leaving the author of
new code to wonder "why won't this link?" because they didn't know
they had to add a -lfoo to the link line.

I believe we should fix the man pages to indicate what library every
documented function is in. (We might as well do libc functions, too,
for completeness.)

I suggest the following strawman....

After the SYNOPSIS section, we should add a LIBRARY section, e.g.:

[...]
NAME
     pw_lock - passwd file update function

SYNOPSIS
     #include <util.h>

     int
     pw_lock(int retries);

LIBRARY
     libutil

DESCRIPTION
[...]


As I said, this is just a strawman. Maybe we should put LIBRARY before
SYNOPSIS, maybe the format is wrong, etc. However, I'd like to get
some consensus on this so that we can actually fix the problem.

Perry