Hi Alex,

At 2025-10-29T11:58:21+0100, Alejandro Colomar wrote:

quoted

quoted

Is this last sentence a guarantee?  Can something different ever
occur?

I don't know the Linux kernel well enough to say.

Hmmm, then I'll reuse the old wording for that, which said it was
likely.

In principle, some linux-mm people might be lurking.

I've now also replaced 'If it fails' by 'If the allocation fails', to
avoid confusing programmers to think that 'it' may refer to the
function (that is, to think that the function can somehow return
NULL).  That would conflist with the previous sentence, so it's not
necessary, but I think this is more readable by being more explicit.

"Clarity over all" is a basic principle of technical writing.

	Author: Alejandro Colomar [off-list ref]
	Date:   Wed Oct 29 11:52:52 2025 +0100

	    man/man3/alloca.3: wfix
	    
	    Reported-by: Alejandro Colomar [off-list ref]
	    Cc: Ahelenia Ziemiańska [off-list ref]
	    Suggested-by: "G. Branden Robinson" [off-list ref]
	    Co-authored-by: "G. Branden Robinson" [off-list ref]
	    Signed-off-by: Alejandro Colomar [off-list ref]

	diff --git a/man/man3/alloca.3 b/man/man3/alloca.3
	index 52b87a8a3..367de81d0 100644
	--- a/man/man3/alloca.3
	+++ b/man/man3/alloca.3
	@@ -111,11 +111,14 @@ .SH NOTES
	 making them unfit for implementing functionality like
	 .BR strdupa (3).
	 .SH BUGS
	-Due to the nature of the stack, it is impossible to check if the allocation
	-would overflow the space available, and, hence, neither is indicating an error.
	-(However, the program is likely to receive a
	+.BR alloca ()
	+does not query the system for available stack memory,
	+and does not fall back to using heap if stack storage is unavailable.
	+It therefore cannot indicate an error if the allocation fails.
	+If the allocation fails,
	+the program is likely to receive a
	 .B SIGSEGV
	-signal if it attempts to access unavailable space.)
	+signal.
	 .P
	 On many systems
	 .BR alloca ()

Would you mind signing the patch?

Signed-off-by: "G. Branden Robinson" <redacted>

There ya go!

Regards,
Branden