New: The BUGS section of the getopt(3) man page describes something that's no longer a bug

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=90261

Bug ID: 90261
Summary: The BUGS section of the getopt(3) man page describes
something that's no longer a bug
Product: Documentation
Version: unspecified
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
Status: NEW
Severity: normal
Priority: P1
Component: man-pages
Assignee: documentation_man-pages-ztI5WcYan/[email protected]
Reporter: guy-FrUbXkNCsVf2fBVCVOL8/[email protected]
Regression: No

The BUGS section of the getopt(3) man page says:

The POSIX.2 specification of getopt() has a technical error described in POSIX.2 Interpretation 150. The GNU implementation (and probably all other implementations) implements the correct behavior rather than that specified.

The interpretation in question is at

https://collaboration.opengroup.org/external/pasc.org/interpretations/unofficial/db/p1003.2/pasc-1003.2-150.html

The request for the interpretation said

To match historic and expected practice, the "not less than argc" on
POSIX.2, P733, L504-505 would need to be changed to "greater than argc".

and the resolution of that interpretation is

In particular the interpretations committee do not believe that this
change from historical practice was intended.
The interpretations committee beleive that on page 733, line 504,
the words 'not less than' should be changed to 'greater than'.

and the Single UNIX Specification, Version 4, entry for getopt(), at

    http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/getopt.html

says

If the option was the last character in the string pointed to by an element
of argv, then optarg shall contain the next element of argv, and optind shall be incremented by 2. If the resulting value of optind is greater than argc, this indicates a missing option-argument, and getopt() shall return an error indication.

so it appears that the *current* version of POSIX - i.e., the Single UNIX Specification - has been changed in the fashion requested.

The BUGS section should probably note this, so that nobody thinks that GNU libc's getopt() behaves in a non-standard fashion in that respect. (The bug was 100% in the POSIX.2 edition, not in the code.)

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https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=90261

Michael Kerrisk <[email protected]> changed:

What |Removed |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

             Status|NEW                         |RESOLVED
                 CC|                            |[email protected]
         Resolution|---                         |CODE_FIX

--- Comment #1 from Michael Kerrisk <[email protected]> --- Thanks for this report. This piece of text in the man page is ancient (from man-pages-1.20, circa 1998), and odd in the sense that it describes a bug in POSIX that was (long ago) subsequently fixed. As the standards committee noted, POSIX here seemed to deviate from existing practice.

The simplest fix here I think is to just remove that BUGS section, which is what I have done.

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