Re: Removing the manpage requirement for GUI programs?

[Yves-Alexis Perez <corsac@debian.org>]

On 28/02/2010 01:32, Ben Finney wrote:
> Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org> writes:
> 
>> > Yes, I overall agree with your arguments. However having it in the
>> > policy means we get bug reports about manual pages and have to deal
>> > with them, while they are not the primary source of documentation for
>> > command-line options.
> If manpages were useful only for documenting command-line options, this
> would be a valid point. As has been pointed out, though, manpages for
> programs are useful for much more than that.
> 

But that's why he doesn't propose to forbid manpages for GUI programs,
just to not have them mandatory (well, agreed, it's a “should”). For
programs where there's no point in having a manpage (and only them) he
proposes to drop the “should” requirement, that's all.

That doesn't prevent motivated people/upstream to provide manpages, it
just spares some time for maintainers. I have few cases in Xfce of such
programs (like all the xfce4-*-settings).

Cheers,
-- 
Yves-Alexis