Re: Navigational corrections

From: Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)
Date: Sat Oct 03 2020 - 07:39:14 EST


Hi Alex,


> >
> > The question of 'void *' is an interesting one. It is something
> > like a fundamental C type, and not something that comes from POSIX.
> > But, it does appear in POSIX APIs and often details of using
> > the type are not well understood. So, as a matter of practicality,
> > and again since you've done the work, I am inclined to include
> > this type in the page, just so it can be handily referred to
> > along with all of the other types.
> >
> > Looking ahead (and I hope none of the above disheartens you,
> > since you've done a lot of great work for this page),
>
> Actually, not.
> Its good to have you tell me what is good for the man and what's not.
> Otherwise, I wouldn't know.
> I keep a branch with all of the rejected patches,
> just to have an idea of what I should not send you :-)
>
> > it would
> > be good if you could provide a bit of an advance roadmap about
> > the types that you'd like to add to the page.
>
> Well, I didn't have a clear roadmap.
> I had some types which I clearly wanted to document,
> and they were ptrdiff_t, and ssize_t,
> which I documented in the first patches,
> and then I was finding related types,
> and also tended to document about types which I knew very well too,
> to have something useful to add to the description.
>
> I may now start writing about off_t and related types,
> which were the ones that made me want this page.

off_t would be great.

In case you are looking for some other candidates, some others
that I would be interested to see go into the page would be

fd_set
clock_t
clockid_t
and probably dev_t


Thanks,

Michael

--
Michael Kerrisk
Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/