Re: Bug#39463,#39482,#39493: timidity, cdrdao, cdtool has no manpage for something

[Roland Rosenfeld <roland@spinnaker.de>]

On Tue, 15 Jun 1999, Santiago Vila wrote:

> > > > | If no manual page is available for a particular program,
> > > > | utility or function and this is reported as a bug on
> > > > | debian-bugs, a symbolic link

> > > I think this is a stupid policy and should be changed.

> > Care to provide reasons?

> If lack of a manpage is a "problem",

IMHO it is.

> what do we gain by making a symlink to undocumented(7),

The symlink is there for information to the user, that he doesn't need 
to provide a bug report, because this bug is already known (that's the 
intension of undocumented(7), as you can read in this man page as well 
as in the policy.

> if it still has to be kept as a "bug"?

The lack of documentation is still a bug until someone provides a man
page. And don't tell me, that undocumented(7) really documents the
programs, which are linked on it.

> On the other hand, if an upstream maintainer does not consider the
> lack of manpage as a bug (examples: most GNU packages),

Are you sure, that _most_ GNU packages come without man pages? As far
as I can see, most GNU packages come with a large texinfo
documentation and with short man pages, shortly explaining the
intension of the program and the options and then pointing the reader
to the info file. So "man <binary>" still is the canonical way to find
out, what <binary> does and it includes a pointer to some extended
documentation. Without this man page you always have to search for the 
documentation. Sometimes it is provided as a info page, sometimes it's 
provided as HTML documentation, sometimes only some README or other
plain text documentation is available, some programs have their
documentation compiled in and in the worse case there is no
documentation available.

Why do you want the user to check all these cases? Isn't it easier to
have one starting point for every binary? At the moment (this may
change in the future), this starting point is the man page, and so I
think, that _every_ binary should provide a man page and if there
isn't any, this is a bug which should be reported.

> does not the Debian maintainer have the right to agree with the
> upstream author about it not being a bug?

No, he doesn't have that right. He only has the right to ignore the
bug report (hoping that someone else will do the job of writing a man
page, as some Debian developers already did).

Ciao

        Roland

-- 
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