Re: replacement for getpass(3) in older program (1994)
On Fri, 04 May 2007 17:11:30 +0200, Michelle Konzack wrote:
> Hello Sam,
>
> Am 2007-05-02 19:06:09, schrieb Sam Morris:
>> On Wed, 02 May 2007 19:19:53 +0200, Michelle Konzack wrote:
>> > I have goten an older source which has some problems to compile under
>> > Sid. After reading a bunch of "manpages-dev" I have seen that
>> > "getpass" is obsolete and I should not use it.
>>
>> Although the getpass man page (dated from seven years ago!) says this,
>> glibc's actual documentation[0] does not mention any problems with the
>> getpass function--so I don't see any particular reason to avoid it.
>>
>> [0]
>> http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/getpass.html#index-
>> getpass-3653
>
> Should I submit a bugreport/patch againt "manpages-dev"?
The only reason I did not do so is because there are a lot of these kind
of errors/omissions. IMO correcting them is not worthwhile because the
'manpages' package will always be an outdated secondhand copy of
upstream's documentation, which is shipped in the 'glibc-doc-reference'
package (in non-free, grr).
If it were up to me, I would replace them all by text automatically
extracted from the info documentation (tricky for technical and legal
reasons) or by skeleton man pages that looks something like this:
GETPASS(3) GNU C Library Reference Manual
NAME
getpass
DESCRIPTION
See
* http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/getpass.html#index-
getpass-3653
* info:(libc)getpass
--
Sam Morris
http://robots.org.uk/
PGP key id 1024D/5EA01078
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