Jason McIntyre <jmc@kerhand.co.uk> wrote:

> On Mon, Apr 21, 2025 at 04:44:20AM +0200, Theo Buehler wrote:
> > > While here, let's also fix the weasely wording "more complete".
> > > The sigaction(2) manual is definitely intended to be and to remain
> > > complete.
> > 
> > I was wondering why userland tools Xr to sigaction(2) rather than
> > higher-level signal(3) for this list. The latter seems friendlier to
> > a non-programmer.
> 
> i've no idea. the rest of userland seems to prefer signal(3).

There's a bit of weird history here, I think I can make a guess.

Ancient unix had racy signal handlers.  This was fixed by the CSRG
people, and sigaction became atomic.  There was a hope, I guess, that
sigaction would become the new interface.  I suspect some people
really took that to heart.

In many systems, this resulted in signal(3) being a rather thin document,
whereas sigaction(2) was much more detailed, exact, and meaty.

I suspect that's why sigaction(2) was pointed at instead of signal(3).

Somewhere during that timeframe, we put some effort into adding more
meat to signal(3).

I think the manual page should point at signal(3), because the extra
details in sigaction(2) are irrelevant.