Hello Michael and Alex,

On Sunday, August 8th, 2021 at 02:10, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) [off-list ref] wrote:

Hello Alex,

On 8/8/21 12:32 AM, Alejandro Colomar (man-pages) wrote:

quoted

On 8/8/21 12:20 AM, Alejandro Colomar (man-pages) wrote:

quoted

stdio (7)', and it's only a ffix.

s/7/3/

I dropped the original patch, and made ir

.BR stdio (3)

This is a case where it would have been good to ask the
proposer for a commit message explaining the motivation for
the original patch (when that patch was submitted).

A few paragraphs at the beginning of the description section
of printf(3) briefly describe the functions in the printf()
family. In these paragraphs, a word in italics almost always
represents a token of C source code:
1) the identifier (format, stream, str, fd, size, ap) or the
   type (va_list) of a parameter in the function declarations
   at the top of the man page;
2) the identifier (va_end, va_arg) for a function-like macro;
3) the identifier (stdout) for the standard output stream.

There is one exception to this rule - stdio. This word
represents a library, not a token. It's not a big problem,
of course, but I think that similar formatting of different
things may be confusing.

The original patch was an attempt to fix this issue. The final
one (by Michael Kerrisk):

-.I stdio
+.BR stdio (3)

is a more suitable solution.

I'm sorry that I didn't include this explanation in the
initial email.

--

Regards,
Sergey Petrakov