Re: manpage for GNU utilities?
On Sat, 21 Feb 1998, Christian Schwarz wrote:
[Are manpages which include a statement that they are outdated any
maintained a policy violation?]
Thanks for all the comments so far!
First of all, the discussion was not about the favourite documentation
format. Debian has been doing a great job so far by giving the local
system administrator a maximum of flexibility so that she can choose
whether program/system she likes. For example, we ship lots of different
mail servers, editors, etc., instead of deciding which one is the best and
only distribute a few packages.
I think it's wise to continue with this `philosophy' when talking about
documentation formats: We should ship manual pages, info, HTML, etc. Once
the doc-base package is fully implemented, we'll have a way to let the
local sysadmin choose which format she prefers without having to ship all
possible formats in our packages.
Now back to the original question: Some (mostly, GNU) packages install
manual pages that state that the pages are `outdated and unmaintained'.
First I considered this is a clear policy violation. I still think that it
would be much better if these manpages would be as actively maintained as
the info pages.
However, the discussion has convinced me that it's much better if a
manpage contains such a note if it is really `outdated and unmaintained'
than otherwise. This way, the users will notice that they should not trust
everything in the manpage. In addition, some very nice users might perhaps
send us a patch to the manual page--or just report if there are some
inconsistencies in the docs.
In summary, I still think it would be nice if the manpages are kept
up-to-date (in fact, this is current policy--in my interpretation) so if
someone notices any bugs in a manpage, feel free to send the maintainer a
patch to fix the problem. However, it would be unwise to let Lintian check
for `outdated' notes in the manual pages, since Lintian can't produce such
a patch itself :)
Thanks for all the comments!
Chris
-- Christian Schwarz
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