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Re: [PATCH] Fix up LD_* vars behaviour
On Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 2:19 PM, Roland McGrath <roland@hack.frob.com> wrote:
>> Roland, unfortunately I feel that your position with respect to the
>> linux man pages project is not correct. As a project we have failed to
>> document our own interfaces and over the years the linux man pages has
>> become *the* canonical documentation for the GNU Libc interfaces like
>> LD_* vars passed to ld.so.1. Whether we agree with them or not is
>> irrelevant at this point, we need to think about our users, and our
>> users for lack of our own documentation, rely on the linux man pages.
>
> I disagree utterly. ?We cannot be held hostage to what some uncoordinated
> other people out in the world have done. ?There is a long history of Linux
> man pages being thoroughly wrong. ?Unfortunately, there is also a long
> history of some glibc features lacking documentation in the manual, and of
> the manual not always being right. ?When the manual does not comport with
> the reality or intent of the code, then we change the manual. ?When the
> manual doesn't say anything at all, then the appropriate level of
> compatibility and the reasonableness of a given user's expectations must be
> subject to our careful judgment. ?There are no easy rules.
>
> What users mostly do in fact is just experiment and observe, and then
> expect the behavior they observed to be preserved in the future.
> Sometimes those expectations are reasonable and sometimes they are not.
> We are responsible to all the users, past, present, and future--not just
> particular vociferous past users who rail against some change. ?We are
> the experts and it's our responsibility to judge what's best overall,
> not that of some subset of users and not that of some man-page writer.
> Sometimes slavish compatibility with the past bad assumptions of
> application developers or outside documentation writers does a
> disservice to the users at large. ?That's one reason we have major
> releases and minor releases. ?Certainly controversial cases don't change
> in minor releases.
I *like* that you disagree with me. I think it's healthy for our
project to have differing points of view. In particular I think our
points of view converge as glibc adds documentation for features that
were previously undocumented. At which point we own the problem and
the solution.
Cheers,
Carlos.