Re: manpage for GNU utilities?
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@datasync.com> writes:
> Providing documentation in format X when the upstream provides
> it in format Y as a one time conversion is not good enough unless an
> machine based conversion process is available, since with ever
> upstream upgrade someone has to maintain the non native
> documentation.
>
> That is not practical.
I agree. Unless we're going to have a small army of texinfo page
authors lying in wait for each new upstream GNU package release, this
seems like bad policy.
On a related note, how many times have you typed "man <foo>", trying
to see if there was a man page for a package, and gotten "No manual
entry for <foo>" when there were actually perfectly good info pages
around.
What I would like to see considered for policy (because I'm lazy), is
that for packages that only have info pages, in lieu of writing
manpages (which may or may not actually happen), we have a manpage
info-documented.1.gz that says more or less
The documentation for package <foo> is available as info pages
under the following headings:
bar
baz
The maintainer for the package can then just copy this page, modify it
to fit their package, and put in the relevant manpage symlinks for
"foo, bar, and baz". Note that the Debian package name should always
be one of the symlinks.
Bad idea?
--
Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu>
PGP fingerprint = E8 0E 0D 04 F5 21 A0 94 53 2B 97 F5 D6 4E 39 30
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