Re: upstreams maintainer conflict, was: wget: remove outdated manual page
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On Fri, 15 May 1998, Nicolas Lichtmaier wrote:
>> Mr. Lichtmaier, seeing the complains, simply went ahead and "updated"
>> the man-page (in fact only adding the docs for new switches), but he
>> left the out-of-date warning! As this man-page was clearly not what I
>> want to see in Wget, I asked Mr. Lichtmaier to either remove the
>> man-page from the package (linking it to undocumented(7), as per
>> Debian policy manual), or to create a simple man page based on `wget
>> --help' output. I got no response.
>
> Here at Debian we like manpages. We decided to provide a manpage with every
Y'know, I like manpages, too. I absolutely detest the info system
as being a very unwieldy way to scan through a document, possibly
because I really don't like mice and I never got used to the Emacs
bindings (if I could bind the cursor keys to back, next and up I might
change this opinion, but I haven't had time to tinker with it yet).
However, on this I have to side with Mr. Niksic. Although the
software is GPL and he has no right to force you to do anything
(apparantly much to his chagrin), he is asking for something that isn't
unreasonable: that you not include information with the package that is
in any way shape or form outdated. If this means that you have to link
temporarily to Undocumented while you finish writing your own manpage
from scratch as he requests, then so be it. It would take me about 10
minutes to write a manpage based upon the wget -h output and add in a
pointer to the info system. What do we lose? A much larger but
possibly inaccurate manpage. What do we gain? Faith in the document's
accuracy, and the good will of an upstream developer. I'd like to see
further versions of wget as free software.
>executable in the system. You have read the policy and know that it would be
>a bug for a Debian package to link to undocumented(7). It would also be a bug to
>remove the manpage. So I've choosen to improve it. It would be great if
>you can point any problem you find in the new version.
It's a bug for the man page to be out of date. Would it help you to
make your decision if I filed a bug against wget now complaining about
that very fact? From the way I understand the message, he has already
pointed to a few problems:
1) It exists (negotiable)
2) It's out of date (non-negotiable)
3) It's his words, not yours
4) It's not clearly marked as being your words.
> I will add a note (kind of a disclaimer) to the page saying that I'm
>responible for it, if you wish. I could add to the end of each section a
>"Consult the info docs for mmore info" message.
Adding the following section (or something similar) to the top of
the manpage might be a good start:
The official documentation for this program as written by the
upstream author is part of the Info system (try "info wget" and "man
info" in place of "man wget"). This document was written by <email> for
the Debian distribution for users that prefer the manpage interface to
the info interface. The upstream author disclaims all responsibility
for this manpage.
> I still think that the manpage is very useful for many users (most
>non-emacs users hate info =) ) and it would a good thing to find a solution
>that suits everybody.
Personally, I agree. Someone made the suggestion of converting the
info pages into SGML, and then using that to create common info and man
pages. That sounds like a pretty good idea to me, though it might be
quite a bit of work. This solution works even if Mr. Niksic has
absolutely no desire to ever work with SGML, since once the original
document is created, diffs to the info file shouldn't be too hard to
locally translate to the SGML, as long as he doesn't create massive
changes to the documentation with every release :)
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