Hello Peng Haitao, On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 8:18 AM, Peng Haitao <penght@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hi Michael and all, > > When doing multithreaded programming, it is necessary to know the thread-safety > levels of the library functions. Yes. > However, there is little thread-safety > information in current man-pages. At the moment, there is just pthreads(7), really. > And the lack of information often makes us > confused when programming in multithreaded environment. > > If we could add information about functions' thread-safety levels based on > POSIX standard into man-pages, just like man-pages in Solaris, it will be > more helpful to programmers who are doing multithreaded programming with GLIBC. > > For function whose thread-safety level is clear, I have made several patches > which contain detailed descriptions of the thread-safety levels. The attached > patches can be as samples. If necessary, I will gradually make more patches > to enhance thread-safety information in man-pages. So what do you think? > > I am looking forward to your feedback soon! The idea is good, but clearly there'd be a lot of work to do. Looking at Sun's attr(5) page http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/816-0220/6m6nkoroc?l=en&a=view suggests to me that we might be better to do this more formally, since there are a number of attributes that may be of interest to programmers, e.g., thread-safetcy reentrant/nonreentrant async-signal-safety cancelation safety By "formal" I mean that we could have a section "ATTRIBUTES" that lists such attributes. That section could fall between VERSIONS and CONFORMING TO (see man-pages(7)). To start with, you might write patches that document just thread-safety, but later other pieces might get added as well (e.g., async-signal-safety). What do you think? If this sounds sensible, write one or two patches in the style I suggest, and then we can discuss furtehr. Cheers, Michael -- Michael Kerrisk Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ Author of "The Linux Programming Interface"; http://man7.org/tlpi/ -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-man" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
