Hi Paul,
On Wed, Sep 20, 2023 at 01:10:59PM -0700, Paul Eggert wrote:
> On 2023-09-20 07:13, enh wrote:
> > that's why i added you --- to suggest better wording 🤣
>
> I noodled around a bit. There are several mistakes about timestamps in the
> man pages. difftime, for example, copies the C standard's "calendar time"
> wording but in Linux it's just a seconds count and need not have anything to
> do with 1970 or any other calendar. And there are lots of other howlers
> about leap seconds and 2038, improperly parenthesized macros, unclear
> wording like "incremental adjustments", out-of-date references, etc.
>
> Attached is a proposed patch to fix the problems I found before I ran out of
> time. I haven't checked formatting. I'm sure it could be improved further.
Please use semantic newlines. See man-pages(7):
$ MANWIDTH=72 man man-pages | sed -n '/Use semantic newlines/,/^$/p'
Use semantic newlines
In the source of a manual page, new sentences should be started
on new lines, long sentences should be split into lines at
clause breaks (commas, semicolons, colons, and so on), and long
clauses should be split at phrase boundaries. This convention,
sometimes known as "semantic newlines", makes it easier to see
the effect of patches, which often operate at the level of in‐
dividual sentences, clauses, or phrases.
E.g., in here:
+and by frequency adjustments performed by NTP and similar
+applications via
or
+near a leap second it is typically adjusted by NTP to stay roughly in
+sync with UTC.
and definitely here:
+range. This can happen if an executable with 32-bit
Thanks,
Alex
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