Subject: Re: wrap up of pipe(2)
To: None <tech-userlevel@netbsd.org>
From: der Mouse <mouse@Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA>
List: tech-userlevel
Date: 10/09/2001 17:30:08
> This is fine, though I don't think the BUGS section is appropriate.
> Unless someone would give any real reasons why EFAULT should be kept
> listed in manpage, I'm going to remove it altogether from the manpage
> within one week.

Well, how "real" it is is a matter of opinion.

It's a question of philosophy: what are manpages?

If the manpage is supposed to be exactly and only what NetBSD does,
then EFAULT should go without a trace.

But if - and this is my position - the manpage is not only
documentation on what NetBSD does, but more general documentation on
the call, warnings about what might surprise someone coming from
elsewhere to NetBSD, someone going from NetBSD to elsewhere, what it
might do in the future, or used to do but doesn't any longer...in that
case, it's appropriate to mention EFAULT, because of all the reasons
that have been brought up before and don't need to be rehashed again.

Most important, to my mind, are the "what might surprise someone trying
to port code one direction or another" reasons.

If you remove EFAULT because the pages are supposed to be exactly and
only what NetBSD does, there are a lot of other things that should be
cleaned up too - for example, memcpy() should be documented identically
to bcopy(), with the current BUGS section removed.

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