Bug 84901

Summary: drand48() unduely declared obsolete
Product: Documentation Reporter: Nadav Har'El (nyh)
Component: man-pagesAssignee: documentation_man-pages (documentation_man-pages)
Status: RESOLVED OBSOLETE    
Severity: normal CC: mtk.manpages
Priority: P1    
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
Kernel Version: Subsystem:
Regression: No Bisected commit-id:

Description Nadav Har'El 2014-09-21 11:12:45 UTC 
The drand48() manual page ends with a note:

"These functions are declared obsolete by SVID 3, which states that rand(3) should be used instead."

The unsuspecting reader will see this, and think that these are obsolete functions he shouldn't use. But he most likely not know that "SVID 3" referred here is actually a document written 25 years ago, in 1989 (!), for SVr4. He will not know that Posix that came more than 10 years later did not call this function obsolete, and that till this day, it is not considered obsolete by Posix (see http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/drand48.html).

So I think this statement about SVID 3 should be dropped. Or, if for some reason you want to keep it, at least add a clarification that this was in 1989 and standards that followed it do not consider these functions obsolete.

Thanks!
Comment 1 Michael Kerrisk 2014-09-21 11:49:35 UTC 
Hello Nadav Har'El,

This was just fixed in the latest man-pages release, after this report:
http://bugs.debian.org/758293

Thanks anyway for the report.

Michael