Re: Removing the manpage requirement for GUI programs?
[2010-02-27 20:06] Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org>
>
> I think it is a waste of time to write manual pages that won't be
> maintained upstream, and that won't contain more useful information than
> --help. The purpose of a manual page is to document precisely the
> behavior of a program, and for GUI applications there is usually an
> associated GUI documentation instead.
Man pages have one more important advantage: Every command has one.
Do not underestimate this. On Debian systems, people know, if they
want to find out how to run a command and what command line options it
has, they look in its man page, cause every command has one.
If some graphical programs would not provide one, the the user would
first try to look in the man page and if it does not exist, he needs
to try --help (maybe he even needs to look for additional
documentation which would be application specific).
In my eyes, the largest advantage of man pages is that every command
has one.
meillo
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