manpage for GNU utilities?
Hi folks!
As everyone knows (at least, should know :) our current policy requires
every program/utility to have a manual page (see policy manual, section
5.1). However, since the FSF prefers `TeXinfo', most GNU utilities have
info manuals. The lack of a manual page is usually reported as bugs (and
also detected by Lintian), so most Debian packages ship a manual page,
too. That's good thing IMO (because I prefer manpages over info manuals
;-)
But in some cases, the manpages contain a text like this (example taken
from sort(1)):
DESCRIPTION
This documentation is no longer being maintained and may
be inaccurate or incomplete. The Texinfo documentation is
now the authoritative source.
IMO, this is a policy violation. Especially, in the case of sort(1), where
the info page is much more up-to-date than the manpage.
Before I start to write a lintian check for this I wanted to discuss this
issue here: I'm sure this Lintian check will produce complaints by a few
maintainers. The point is: Either we ship manual pages (then they have to
be up-to-date) or we don't ship manual pages. I'm clearly for the first
option.
Comments are welcome!
Thanks,
Chris
-- _,, Christian Schwarz
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! ___; schwarz@debian.org, schwarz@mathematik.tu-muenchen.de
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