On Sun, Mar 14, 2021 at 12:04 PM Alejandro Colomar via Libc-alpha <libc-alpha@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > The manual pages are already inconsistent in which headers need > to be included. Right now, not all of the types used by a > function have their required header included in the SYNOPSIS. > > If we were to add the headers required by all of the types used by > functions, the SYNOPSIS would grow too much. Not only it would > grow too much, but the information there would be less precise. > > Having system_data_types(7) document each type with all the > information about required includes is much more precise, and the > info is centralized so that it's much easier to maintain. > > So let's document only the include required for the function > prototype, and also the ones required for the macros needed to > call the function. I endorse this change. For glibc, if the header file containing the function prototype doesn't also provide everything you need to call the function, it's a bug (except for a few cases where the relevant standards prevent us from doing this, e.g. a function that calls vprintf will need the macros in <stdarg.h>, but the C standard specifically forbids <stdio.h> to include <stdarg.h>). > <sys/types.h> only defines types, not functions or constants, so > it doesn't belong to man[23] (function) pages at all. > I ignore if some old systems had headers that required you to > include <sys/types.h> *before* them (incomplete headers), Such systems did exist in the past, but they are too old to worry about nowadays. I don't think it's possible for them to be compliant with POSIX.1-1995, and the examples I know of personally (SunOS 4, for instance) were not even fully compliant with C89. zw
