Re: writing man pages or texinfo documentation
Date: Mon, 24 May 1999 16:07:56 +0200
From: Marcus Brinkmann <Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de>
Hello,
another excellent way to help our effort is to write man pages. Debian
policy mandates that every binary comes with a manpage. We have none
currently. The information you need has to be gathered together from the
hurd.texi file, the executables, the sources, and existing man pages.
I know that the GNU project doesn't like man pages. Improving the info file
would of course also be a good way to help. We can than write a dummy man
page that only goves a synopsis and then points to the info file.
IMHO, we really should not waste time on man pages. It is better to
work on proper documentation instead, extending the current Hurd
texinfo manual. Having some information in man pages and other
information in the manual is confusing. What will happen is that at a
certain point the manual pages will even contradict what's in the
manual.
Note that some of the newer GNU packages have a Perl script that
creates man pages from --help and --version output. Take a look at
ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/fetish/fileutils-4.0i.tar.gz for an example.
IMHO this is would be the best solution for creating man pages for
Hurd programs.
Mark
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