Re: getpass documentation

[Bruno Haible]

Simon Josefsson wrote:
> > What's the reason that you mention "from /dev/tty (or stdin)"? Don't other
> > implementations read from /dev/tty or stdin?
> 
> Without that part, I found to description to be somewhat ambiguous: it
> could be interpreted as a function that returns a random password, not
> one read from the user.  Do you think "from the user" is better?

I think writing it in a way that does not force to repeat what the function
does gets it shorter. Like this. I also went through a couple of systems to
see what the limit actually is.


2008-05-19  Bruno Haible  <address@hidden>

        * doc/glibc-functions/getpass.texi: Document limits of other
        implementations.

*** doc/glibc-functions/getpass.texi.orig       2008-05-19 13:11:20.000000000 
+0200
--- doc/glibc-functions/getpass.texi    2008-05-19 13:09:50.000000000 +0200
***************
*** 14,22 ****
  Portability problems fixed by Gnulib module @code{getpass-gnu}:
  @itemize
  @item
! The gnulib implementation return a password of arbitrary length read
! from /dev/tty (or stdin), other implementations may truncate the
! password to PASS_MAX or 8 characters.
  @end itemize
  
  Portability problems not fixed by Gnulib:
--- 14,22 ----
  Portability problems fixed by Gnulib module @code{getpass-gnu}:
  @itemize
  @item
! The returned password is truncated to PASS_MAX characters on some platforms:
! MacOS X 10.5 (128), FreeBSD 6.2 (128), NetBSD 3.0 (128), OpenBSD 4.0 (128), 
AIX 5.1 (32), HP-UX 11 (8), IRIX 6.5 (32), OSF/1 5.1 (80), Solaris 10 (8, even 
less than PATH_MAX), Cygwin (128).
! The gnulib implementation returns the password untruncated.
  @end itemize
  
  Portability problems not fixed by Gnulib: