4 ms·

Is there a changelog for these standards?

diggan 2y ago
Not an official one, as far as I'm aware. Maybe the Wikipedia article is the best resource for that right now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX#Versions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX#Versions (but doesn't seem to have info on POSIX.1-2024 yet)
crote 2y ago
I keep getting surprised at how little the tech industry as a whole seems to care about documentation. Way too many authors just upload the new PDF to some website - of course overwriting the old one. As an implementer I'm often more interested in the exact changes than in the current wording. My product is already supporting the old spec, what do I need to change to support the new one? A redlined version is more valuable than the full PDF. Bonus points if it actually comes with the reasoning behind it so I don't have to guess why some seemingly-arbitrary change was made. My dream documentation is a simple Markdown file (or similar) stored in a git repository. It allows me to see the current version, the old version, the diff, and the commit messages can even store the reasoning.
- LegionMammal978 2y ago
  Though with a sufficiently-gnarly release history, even the Git repo might not tell the full story. I've recently been tracing the history of one particular library that's been around since the early 2000s, and hardly any of the versioned Git tags correspond exactly to the files in the released tarballs. Finding all the releases was quite tedious: the tarballs were published on multiple websites, some tarballs were updated in place (without changing the version number), one website (which held some versions exclusive to it) routinely deleted very old versions, and that website also no longer exists outside the Internet Archive. Overall, some of the releases have been totally lost to time, and the Git repo is of no help in reconstructing them.
- jwilk 2y ago
  POSIX folks "have no plans to move to a public git repository for managing the development of the standard." https://lore.kernel.org/linux-man/04801FEA-3560-4BA5-93EF-76E503032C40@opengroup.org/ https://lore.kernel.org/linux-man/04801FEA-3560-4BA5-93EF-76...

Not an official one, as far as I'm aware. Maybe the Wikipedia article is the best resource for that right now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX#Versions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX#Versions (but doesn't seem to have info on POSIX.1-2024 yet)

crote 2y ago

I keep getting surprised at how little the tech industry as a whole seems to care about documentation. Way too many authors just upload the new PDF to some website - of course overwriting the old one. As an implementer I'm often more interested in the exact changes than in the current wording. My product is already supporting the old spec, what do I need to change to support the new one? A redlined version is more valuable than the full PDF. Bonus points if it actually comes with the reasoning behind it so I don't have to guess why some seemingly-arbitrary change was made. My dream documentation is a simple Markdown file (or similar) stored in a git repository. It allows me to see the current version, the old version, the diff, and the commit messages can even store the reasoning.

LegionMammal978 2y ago
Though with a sufficiently-gnarly release history, even the Git repo might not tell the full story. I've recently been tracing the history of one particular library that's been around since the early 2000s, and hardly any of the versioned Git tags correspond exactly to the files in the released tarballs. Finding all the releases was quite tedious: the tarballs were published on multiple websites, some tarballs were updated in place (without changing the version number), one website (which held some versions exclusive to it) routinely deleted very old versions, and that website also no longer exists outside the Internet Archive. Overall, some of the releases have been totally lost to time, and the Git repo is of no help in reconstructing them.
jwilk 2y ago
POSIX folks "have no plans to move to a public git repository for managing the development of the standard." https://lore.kernel.org/linux-man/04801FEA-3560-4BA5-93EF-76E503032C40@opengroup.org/ https://lore.kernel.org/linux-man/04801FEA-3560-4BA5-93EF-76...