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Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2007 12:53:13 -0700
From: Brian Dessent <brian AT dessent DOT net>
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Subject: Re: Looking for man pages
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Bob McConnell wrote:

> But you are sending me to the SUS documentation, which is also missing
> those differences? That seems rather counter productive.
> 

The SUSv3 (POSIX) specifies an abstract ideal standard, not any one
particular implementation.  The Linux manpages document a specific
implementation of this standard, one which has historically been
somewhat militant about "we will do what the standard says when it makes
sense to us, but we will invent extensions when we disagree with it."

Or in other words, it is a bug if Cygwin doesn't implement something
that POSIX says it should.  It's not a bug if Cygwin doesn't or can't
implement some glibc extension or optimization (though of course for
porting it would be desirable if we could as much as possible.)  In that
sense, using the POSIX spec as documentation when programming under
Cygwin is a good idea; in fact it's a good idea to code to POSIX no
matter what OS you're using, since otherwise you're liable to use
nonportable constructs that are specific to your operating system.

> Are there any documents available that explain those differences, or are
> they only held in the programmers' heads at this point?

Cygwin includes a list of which functions from the various standards it
implements and where it differs.  This is at
<http://cygwin.com/cygwin-api/cygwin-api.html>, though I don't know if
this reflects the recent cleanup that was done to this documentation.

Brian

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