Re: Proposal regarding future packaging

[Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de>]

"Ken Spath" <kspath@spath.net> writes:

> Proposal regarding future packaging:
>
> Add an additional manual page to new/future/updated packages that is
> the same as the package name. IF and only IF there would NOT be a
> conflict with an existant necessary manual page AND IF there is no
> binary in a package that is the same as the package name.

I did run into the same problem a few times myself and it always
bugged me. So yes, please keep at this.

Maybe it could be as simple as a dh_* command that looks at
[/usr]/[s]bin and /usr/share/man and generates a pretty printed
version of the contents. It could maybe extract the NAME section of
manpages for binaries to give an idea of what they do:

PACKAGE(x)               Debian Package              PACKAGE(x)

NAME
        x - The Debian x package

BINARIES
       bash - GNU Bourne-Again SHell
       cp - copy files and directories
       sed - stream editor for filtering and transforming text

DOCUMENTATION
        /usr/share/doc/x/README.Debian
        /usr/share/doc/x/examples

SEE ALSO
       bash(1), info cp, sed(1)


Hope that encourages you to work on this.

MfG
        Goswin