Re: minimal documentation or usefulness of new package -- teleport?

[Steve Greenland <steveg@moregruel.net>]

On 08-Oct-03, 15:40 (CDT), Moray Allan <moray@sermisy.org> wrote: 
> Indeed. Why do you assume that there would be Debian-specific documents?
> [snip] 
> Indeed. Why do you assume there would be info documents?
> [snip] 

I think he was just noting that he'd looked in all the different typical
places for documentation.

> I suspect you'd save time on Debian systems by looking for man pages
> before other possible forms of documentation.

It varies. There's a lot of manpages that point to info pages, or HTML
under /usr/share/doc/. Not to mention good old undocumented(7).

> > Hmm, --help does not display help, nor does -h. 
> 
> Do you usually feed programmes random options not included in their
> man pages?

Random? Hardly. Programs that don't recognize (at least one of) -h or
--help, even if only to point the user at the real documentation, are
buggy. This is a long standing Unix convention, and is one of the first
things that ought to be implemented in a new package. IF nothing else,
it can say "No docs yet" so the poor user doesn't waste her time looking
for them.

> Please file bugs rather than ranting on debian-devel.

But this is exactly the correct answer. Problems with individual
packages are exactly that. If you want a problem fixed, file a bug. If
the solution to the problem needs to be discussed in a wider venue, then
it will be.

Steve

-- 
Steve Greenland
    The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating
    system and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the
    world.       -- seen on the net