Re: Requirement for a “proper manpage” for every command

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

(Gunnar, and others, please don't send individual responses that you
also send to the mailing list.)

Gunnar Wolf <gwolf@gwolf.org> writes:

> Hmh, this could even be promoted as a "best packaging practice".
> Many authors do ship properly-formatted --help entries, and our
> hand-generated manpages can often linger behind the truth. Any
> strong opinions against?

The information appropriate for a man page (separate “description”,
“options”, “examples”, “files”, “environment variables”, “see
also”, etc.) is not appropriate for cramming into a ‘--help’ output,
so shouldn't be expected to be there.

I don't know how many ‘--help’ outputs actually provide all that
information in such a form that ‘help2man’ can extract it; I think the
number would be quite few. I would expect that any which do are rather
bloated as a result.

-- 
 \        “I bought a dog the other day. I named him Stay. It's fun to |
  `\     call him. ‘Come here, Stay! Come here, Stay!’ He went insane. |
_o__)         Now he just ignores me and keeps typing.” —Steven Wright |
Ben Finney