Hi наб, At 2023-08-03T18:54:14+0200, наб wrote: > I think it's definitely being adversarial to the reader, yes. Hard to > come up with a better newbie trap than vaguely saying "on some > (possibly popular) systems you need a property which fundamentally > excludes half of the use-cases", bonus points for making that property > an obscure-if-you-don't-know-about-it operation on directories, > documented once half-way through the fifty errors in open(2). > > It would have cost approximately nothing to include HP-UX and AIX in > the text (especially since they're already in the commit message), or > to mention the directory syncing usecase explicitly here, or up to 5 > minutes to arrive at the bisection I got, or write this in a way that > isn't FUD, so it must've been on purpose. It might have been an effort at making the more robust to obsolescence. Who knows what AIX or HP-UX will do with fsync(2)? Will their vendors let the Linux man-pages community know if their kernels change? How many Linux man-pages contributors have access to these systems to check? Possibly better would have been to gather (from Guillem Jover, apparently) the `uname -r` versions of HP-UX and AIX and annotate those specifically. Anyone who didn't run those systems could ignore the admonition, anyone had those exact versions would be advised, and anyone who ran a different version of them would know they'd probably have to test the implementation themselves. There are sometimes innocent explanations for things. (But the exceptions really do sting.) Regards, Branden
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