Re: Bug#39830: [PROPOSED]: get rid of undocumented(7) symlinks
On Tue, 22 Jun 1999, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> How about:
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> If no manual page is available for a particular program, utility
> or function, this is a bug in the package. Until this is
> rectified, a symbolic link from the missing manual page to the
> undocumented(7) manual page must be provided. This indicates that
> you, the maintainer, are aware of this bug in your package.
>
> If a bug is reported on the package, do not close the bug
> report until a proper manpage is available.
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
This is clearer than the actual policy (2.5.1), but doesn't change the
meaning.
My intension was to get rid of these undocumented.7 symlinks, because
they are quite useless because of the following points:
a) dpkg -L <package> shows that there is a man page, but there is only
this useless symlink.
b) The idea behind this undocumented.7 symlink was, that it should
show the user, that the author knows about the missing man page and
that it isn't needed to write a bug report about this. As we have
seen in the past, this doesn't work (many maintainers simply create
the symlink to stop lintian yelling, but no bug reports were
filed).
So I think that the undocumented.7 symlink is no longer useful and
should be removed from policy.
Ciao
Roland
--
* roland@spinnaker.de * http://www.spinnaker.de/ *
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