Re: [PATCH 1/2] system_data_types.7: Add 'off_t'

["Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)" <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>]

Hi Alex,

On Tue, 27 Oct 2020 at 16:25, Alejandro Colomar <colomar.6.4.3@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 2020-10-27 14:47, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote:
> > On 10/27/20 11:23 AM, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> >> Hi Michael,
> >>
> >> On 2020-10-07 08:53, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote:
> >>> On 10/6/20 12:12 AM, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> >>>> Signed-off-by: Alejandro Colomar <colomar.6.4.3@gmail.com>
> >>>
> >>> Hi Alex,
> >>>
> >>> Thanks, patch applied. And I trimmed the "See also" a little.
> >>> I'd hold off on documenting loff_t and off64_t for the
> >>> moment. As you note in another mail, the *lseek* man page
> >>> situation is a bit of a mess. I'm not yet sure what to do.
> >>
> >>
> >> I saw a TODO in the page about loff_t.
> >> Just wanted to ping you in case you forgot about it (I did).
> >
> > I didn't forget it exactly. I just don't know that I have the
> > inclination to do anything about the messy *llseek* pages.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Michael
> >
> >
>
>
> Hi Michael,
>
> I've been reading them to add loff_t and off64_t to sys_data_types.
> Now that I've read them (not too deep),
> I think that lseek64(3) is good enough,
> and maybe we should look for small details
> missing there but present on the others,
> and merge those to lseek64.3.
> And then keep links in the other pages pointing to lseek64.3.
>
> Any thoughts?

Those pages have a long history, and I confess to not understanding
all of the details of the history. Looking more closely at the pages,
I think they are good enough. Let's leave them alone. (I did apply one
patch just now.)

Thinking about it further, I don't think it's necessary to document
loff_t in system_data_types(7). No APIs in the current glibc headers
even use loff_t, as far as I can see. I'm not sure that 'off64_t'
really needs documenting there either.

Thanks,

Michael





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