Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2014 08:04:11 +1000 From: matthew green <m...@eterna.com.au> Message-ID: <29001.1409004...@splode.eterna.com.au>
| Joerg Sonnenberger: | > memcmp is only supposed to provide the correct sign, not the difference. | | true, but that's not what memcmp(9) says. This is a "normal" problem with man pages - they're written to document what the code actually does, then interpreted as a specification of what the code is required to do. Man pages should be the former, the latter is the job of standards docs. If anything needs changing, it would be to make it more clear that the man pages should not be interpreted as an interface specification, but as a statement of what the implementations actually do - not to be interpreted as a promise that they will always do that - for what can be relied upon a reference should be made to the relevant standard (which can be POSIX (or IEEE for C, or anyone else), or POSIX (etc) as amended by NetBSD, or a NetBSD private standard for stuff that either isn't documented by anyone else's standards doc, or where NetBSD's version has simply decided to be different. kre