Bug#460637: LinuxThreads manual pages (Re: glibc-doc: Manual pages are outdated for NPTL)

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Hi,

Josef Spillner wrote:
> The man pages are LinuxThreads-specific, even though the default
> implementation of pthreads is NPTL nowadays. Some library calls such as
> pthread_mutexattr_setpshared are missing, and some of the limitations
> (such as using inter-process mutex locking), options and other
> peculiarities also differ.
> 
> Unfortunately I think that the docs are outdated upstream as well

Indeed, the LinuxThreads man pages are not even maintained upstream
any more AFAICT.

My suggestion would be to copy over any information and text that applies
for NPTL to the man-pages project, and once the man-pages versions are
deemed suitable (or maybe right away), get the Debian glibc-doc package
to stop shipping these files and manpages-dev to start.

The LinuxThreads man pages can be found in the subdirectory
linuxthreads/man/ of the tree

  git://sourceware.org/git/glibc.git tags/glibc-2.4~922

The man-pages project repository can be found in the subdirectory man3/
of the tree

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git

I could not find an explicit distribution license for the LinuxThreads
man page, but they are part of LinuxThreads, so they are presumably
LGPL-2.1+; man-pages, on the other hand, consists mostly of pages with
a more permissive license but accepts pages under the GPL as well. [1]

I am cc-ing Michael Kerrisk, who wrote all of the pthread_* pages in
man-pages I’ve checked.  Michael, what do you think?  Would you be
interested in patches porting over details and explanations from
LinuxThreads?

Jonathan

[1] http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/licenses.html