On Mon, Jul 20, 2020 at 11:31:16PM +0200, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote:

Hello Dave,

TL;DR: don't worry about the small stuff; I'm happy to do the minor
edits given the high quality of your patches.

On Mon, 20 Jul 2020 at 18:52, Dave Martin [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 01:52:24PM +0200, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote:

quoted

Hi Dave,

On 6/24/20 7:36 PM, Dave Martin wrote:

quoted

A bunch of updates to the prctl(2) man page to fill in missing
prctls (mostly) up to Linux 5.6 (along with a few other tweaks and
fixes).

Patches from the v2 series [1] that have been applied or rejected
already have been dropped.

All that remain here now are the SVE and tagged address ABI controls
for arm64.



[1] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-man/1590614258-24728-1-git-send-email-Dave.Martin@arm.com/ (local)


Dave Martin (2):
  prctl.2: Add SVE prctls (arm64)
  prctl.2: Add tagged address ABI control prctls (arm64)

 man2/prctl.2 | 331 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 1 file changed, 331 insertions(+)

Thanks. I've pushed these changes to master now.

Thanks -- btw I finally got around to reviewing master, and noted a few
editorial changes that man-pages(7) does not make any statement about:

"arg1, arg2, and arg3"

        Do you strictly prefer the command before "and" here?

        Conventionally, the final comma would typically be omitted in
        prose, except where the list members are complex enough that the
        command is required to assist parsing.  However, lists of formal
        arguments are not quite vanilla prose.

There are two camps wrt that comma. I prefer the so-called Oxford
comma convention, as shown above. man-pages uses it generally.

quoted

"Providing that" -> "Provided that"

        Any particular rationale here?

Either would be fine; the past tense is just slightly better, to my ear.

quoted

"error EFOO" -> "the error EFOO"

        Is this a rule, in general?

I think the change that you refer to was actually: "with EFOO" to
"with the error EFOO". The former is just a little too brief, to my
ear.

quoted

.IP \(bu 2

        I assumed that specifying an explicit indentation amount would
        be fragile.  Going with the default behaviour also tends to
        result in a more consistent appearance.  Do you have any
        recommandations in this area?

        Do you have rules about the order to use bullet symbols?  I tend
        to avoid \(bu if possible, since while it's "correct", nroff can
        render it nastily as an unadorned letter "o" (e.g., with -Tascii
        or LC_CTYPE=C).  This is particlarly annoying if the indent is
        <= 2, since then the "o" tends to be visually swallowed by the
        following text (i.e., to a casual glance it looks like a word,
        particlarly if the following text is not capitalised).  Perhaps
        this is a bad glyph substitution decision in nroff rather than
        something that should be fixed in the man-pages source, but the
        man-pages source may be easier to fix...

        There is already inconsistency here: there are may top-level
        lists using ".IP *" in prctl.2, and plenty of places where the
        default indentation is used.

I must admit that I'm in the process of rethinking bulleted lists, and
I have not come to a conclusion (and that's why nothing is said in
man-pages(7), and also why there is currently inconsistency).

Using .IP with the default indent (8n) results in a very deep indent
between the glyph and the text, so it's not my preference.

Is it worth trying to change the default indent in the macro package, or
will that just upset other people?

Your note about the poor rendering with "-Tascii" is interesting.
Perhaps ".IP \(bu 3" may be better. But, I really do not know: do
people really render with "-Tascii" these days?

Probably not, though it may happen depending on the locale and/or
terminal type settings in minimal distro installs.

It's a minor annoyance at worst, and probably not worth fixing...

quoted

Should any of these be written up in man-pages(7), or is there a checker
than can detect them?

Perhaps man-pages should say something about the Oxford comma.

Fair enough.

quoted

I wan't to minimise the amount of tweaking you have to do when merging
patches.

If every patch that I received was of the same quality as yours are,
my life would be much easier. The tweaks are minimal work on my part.
Don't worry. Just send me more patches :-).

OK, I won't agonise too much over this, then.

Cheers
---Dave

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