Re: NAME_MAX usage not consistent across man pages

[Nicolas Joly <njoly%pasteur.fr@localhost>]

On Tue, Jun 01, 2010 at 05:11:54AM +0000, David Holland wrote:
> On Sun, May 23, 2010 at 11:01:16PM +0200, Nicolas Joly wrote:
>  > While looking to some man pages, i noticed that NAME_MAX define usage
>  > is not consistent ... Some of them use it enclosed with braces, and
>  > some others do not; and there is 3 variants for setting braces :
>  > 
>  > njoly@petaure [share/man]> find man* -type f -name '*.[1-9]' | xargs grep 
> -h '[^_A-Z]NAME_MAX' | sort | uniq -c
>  >    5 .Brq Dv NAME_MAX
>  >    2 .Brq Dv NAME_MAX .
>  >   14 .Dv NAME_MAX
>  >    4 .Dv NAME_MAX .
>  >    3 .Dv { NAME_MAX }
>  >   30 .Dv {NAME_MAX}
>  > 
>  > To be consistent across all pages, we should use a single expression
>  > in all pages. I'm for using the `.Brq Dv NAME_MAX' one, which add the
>  > braces (without spaces, following the opengroup man pages) using a
>  > mdoc macro.
>  > 
>  > Comments ?
> 
> Why do we want the braces? And if we do, why is this particular symbol
> different from all other uses of Dv?

Actually, AFAIK, in the syscalls man pages we do not refers strictly
to the globally defined XXX_MAX value; but rather to a symbolic name
which value may differs depending on the underlying
filesystem... value which can be retrieved with statvfs(2) or
pathconf(2).

-- 
Nicolas Joly

Biological Software and Databanks.
Institut Pasteur, Paris.