Re: Removing the manpage requirement for GUI programs?

[Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org>]

Le jeudi 04 mars 2010 à 22:40 +0900, Charles Plessy a écrit :
> Still, it would be nice to be able to know about the purpose of the programs
> that are ran or stored on our computers. Would there be a way to hijack the
> whatis database of the man infrastructure for this, with for instance a section
> numero 0? A cheap solution would be to use manpages with only a NAME section.
> It would be trivial to write a helper script that is fed with a name and a
> one-line description, and that produces a Debian manpages. For programs with a
> GUI, the source of information could be the .desktop menu entry. It would have
> the great advantage that the information and the translations would be managed
> upstream.

Hacking the whatis system so that it can look into .desktop files sounds
indeed like a better solution than other things that have been proposed.

I can’t help noticing, though, that it would only duplicate
functionality that is already present in search engines of desktop help
systems (which are also able to search in manual pages, FWIW).

Cheers,
-- 
 .''`.      Josselin Mouette
: :' :
`. `'   “A handshake with whitnesses is the same
  `-     as a signed contact.”  -- Jörg Schilling