Re: Recommendations for man pages in Debian

[Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au>]

Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org> writes:

> On Tue, 18 Aug 2009, Russ Allbery wrote:
> > Given our limited success in getting people to provide man pages for
> > every binary to start with, I'm reluctant to ask package maintainers
> > to patch upstream man pages to do relatively inconsequential things
> > like add dates to the .TH line. I suspect most readers of the man
> > page don't care.

Whether or not the reader of the man page cares, it seems like a good
way to address the issue of date-stamping man pages in a way both
machine-parseable and human-parseable.

> I agree. While Ben's suggestion sounds nice in theory, it's bound to
> be a recommendation that will not be acted upon because we have many
> more interesting challenges to tackle.

The challenge brought up earlier in this thread, that of determining
outdated translated man pages, was at least part of the point of the
recommendation to standardise the ‘TH’ command content in man pages.

-- 
 \             “To label any subject unsuitable for comedy is to admit |
  `\                                           defeat.” —Peter Sellers |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney