On Fri, 31 Jul 2026, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > More to the point: what's a better forum for pursuing this attempt at > reform that will both (a) reach a significant population of stakeholders > who can variously red-team it and/or endorse it; and (b) has sufficient > visibility that it can't easily be ignored by people who oppose reform > in this area for whatever reason?
man-pages should document the world of C APIs as it is, in a way that has broad community agreement; it should follow, not lead, on any changes. When an API has been in <string.h> since 1989, that means documenting <string.h> as the main location for that API - not some other location one person thinks is better and that most of the community has never heard of. Of course, where there is broad agreement on a deficiency in a particular API, it's entirely appropriate for man-pages to document it (for example, to warn against certain naive uses of strncpy or strncat and make clear the very specific use case those functions are intended for - but not to promote one person's idea of alternative names for those functions). -- Joseph S. Myers [email protected]
