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Re: Social Contract GR's Affect on sarge



Michael Banck writes:

> So even if the glibc functions might be documented in manpages in a
> satisfactory way, this is probably not true for the rest of the GNU
> packages.

I would disagree that even glibc functions are adequately documented
in man pages.  To pick just one example, the mcheck() and mallinfo()
functions are part of the malloc debugging support in glibc.  I cannot
find mention of them in the man pages, but they are described at
length in the info files; I have used them before to try to debug
memory bugs in a program I maintain [1].

To adequately re-document everything that is in upstream documentation
(but in a non-free format) will be an enormous amount of effort,
especially as upstream adds new features.

Michael Poole

[1]- To forestall the suggestion to use valgrind instead, the program
in question uses 500 MB of memory without any debugging overhead, and
has not exhibited the errors on smaller test sets.  32-bit valgrind
exhausts the user memory space before it loads the full data set.



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