Re: Bug#39830: [PROPOSED]: get rid of undocumented(7) symlinks
On Sun, 27 Jun 1999, Steve Greenland wrote:
> The advantage of undocumented(7) is all the info is (supposedly) in
> one place: "There is no man page for this program,
Correct.
I personally prefer to get a simple message about this instead of
reading the same undocumented(7) every time, but this is another
question.
> this is considered a bug, the maintainer is aware of it,
The latter isn't true for most developers. I got many responses of my
bug reports where the developers didn't know that the link to
undocumented doesn't fix the "missing man page"-bug. The worst case
was that I got some flames and one very useful program was removed
from a package, because there wasn't a man page...
> and a bug has been filed".
I checked my local system and found out, that for ca. 90% of the
undocumented.7 symlinks no bug reports were filed. I filed these bug
reports now (for the packages I have installed here, but there will be
many others in the other packages), but this stands in contrast to the
contents of undocumented(7), which told me not to file bug reports...
So my view of the actual situation is, that the idea of the
undocumented.7 symlinks doesn't work.
> Now, if any of those clauses is not true, then that needs to be
> fixed. But simply removing the link is unlikely (IMO) to make the
> maintainer more responsive to the lack of a manpage.
Maybe the first step should be changing lintian to tell the
maintainers that also a undocumented.7 symlink is a bug.
> Ahhh. The actual result *will* be the filing of multiple bug
> reports, which will eventually annoy the maintainer into writing a
> man page. I follow your reasoning.
But this doesn't solve the other problem: dpkg -L shows these symlinks
as real man pages. This is annoying at least for me...
Ciao
Roland
--
* roland@spinnaker.de * http://www.spinnaker.de/ *
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