Bug#348864: please check if man page is in right section
On Thu, Jan 19, 2006 at 02:28:48PM +0000, Martin Michlmayr wrote:
> * Frank Lichtenheld <djpig@debian.org> [2006-01-19 15:08]:
> > See #253011 for a bug requesting the opposite (i.e. disabling the
> > check that we had for this).
>
> Perhaps Colin can comment whether the argument in #253011 is sound.
Yes, I tend to agree with the reporter of #253011. The division between
bin and sbin is not quite the same as the division between sections 1
and 8: a program should live in bin if it can reasonably be used by
normal users, but a manual page should be in section 8 if the program is
primarily intended for system administration.
aptitude is a reasonable example. It's clearly primarily a system
administration tool, and thus its man page is in section 8. However, it
has some functions which are very useful to unprivileged users, for
example:
<cjwatson@cairhien ~>$ aptitude download man-db
E: /home/cjwatson/.aptitude/config - Unable to open %s for writing (13 Permission denied)
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading extended state information
Initializing package states... Done
Reading task descriptions... Done
Building tag database... Done
Get:1 http://riva unstable/main man-db 2.4.3-3 [691kB]
Fetched 691kB in 3s (206kB/s)
<cjwatson@cairhien ~>$ ls -l man-db_2.4.3-3_powerpc.deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 cjwatson cjwatson 691382 2005-09-21 13:17 man-db_2.4.3-3_powerpc.deb
... and thus it is (correctly) in /usr/bin. apt-cache is similar; I
almost never run it as root but it's clearly to do with system
administration.
All that said, while I can think of valid examples where a program is in
bin with a man page in section 8, I can't think of any valid examples
where a program is in sbin with a man page in section 1. I think a check
for the latter would probably be reasonable enough.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@debian.org]
Reply to: