Bug#570998: lintian: Please check that commands in /{usr/,}sbin do not use section 1 manpages
Dmitry Bogatov <KAction@debian.org> writes:
> I do not see large gap between "System management commands" and
> "binaries for system administration". So I still claim that this is FHS
> violation. But...
> ... I have to admit that fixing this warning, especially with
> non-cooperative upstream (e.g #932438) causes major pain.
> So okay, let us drop severity to "info" with long description a-la
> binary in /sbin and manpage in section 1 is likely contitutes
> violation of FHS. Please discuss this matter with upstream.
Just adding a data point here:
This is something that I spent a whole lot of time trying to think through
and get right in Debian packages in the past, and with upstreams that I
was working with (OpenAFS, for instance, which has numerous man pages).
After doing all of that work, I've subsequently come to feel that it was
largely a waste of my time and no one really cared.
The only time it really matters from a technical perspective that one
chose between section 8 and section 1 is when you want to install a man
page with the same name in both sections, which is something that we
probably should never do for other reasons (it implies a conflicting
binary, for instance, which is going to be a mess for users).
Beyond that, approximately everyone just runs "man command", and man looks
in both section 1 and section 8, and it rarely ends up mattering. Almost
no one explicitly selects section 1 or section 8 and then gets surprised
that the man page isn't there. And trying to be precise about this
results in endless hair-splitting, since there are *tons* of commands that
are *almost entirely* intended solely for system administrators but have
one or two use cases for regular users, so get moved into /usr/bin because
some people don't have /usr/sbin in their path. Or commands that used to
be exclusively for the local system administrator that now have a bunch of
non-sysadmin use cases but are still in /usr/sbin because moving things is
hard. Or commands that are purely for administrators but are for
administrators of something other than the local system, which upstreams
sometimes put in section 8 because they're useless for the average user
but which shouldn't go in /usr/sbin because they're unrelated to root
privileges on the local system.
You can do a bunch of work to try to make all of this consistent, and I
still do for things where I'm upstream because I get some personal
satisfaction out of making things neat and tidy, but I really don't think
it's a great use of anyone's time unless they enjoy working on things like
this. In nearly every case, no one is going to notice the results.
Given that, I would argue against having a Lintian tag at all, or at most
making it pedantic.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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