Ban undocumented(7) for native packages?
I think undocumented(7) does serve a useful purpose, particularly when
the program does have useful documentation in another format.
However, I also think policy should prohibit the use of
undocumented(7) by Debian native packages. Debian has made a
statement (elsewhere in the policy documents) that we consider man
pages an essential element of programs, and I think we should practice
what we preach.
I suspect few, if any, native packages infringe upon this proposed
policy; so much the better. But I do think we have a stronger case
for asking upstream authors to include man pages if we do it for all
the packages in our distribution that we write ourselves.
I'm not formally proposing this idea; at the moment, it's a trial
balloon to see if we can get some agreement on a process in which we
document everything by woody+1 at the latest.
(Incidentally, at least one of my Debian man pages has propogated
upstream and has been useful for other distributions. We probably
should write proper man pages as a contribution to the upstream
author's work, in addition to our commitment to our users.)
Chris
--
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| Chris Lawrence | Get rid of Roger Wicker this year! |
| <quango@watervalley.net> | http://www.lordsutch.com/ms-one/ |
| | |
| Open Directory Editor | Are you tired of politics as usual? |
| http://dmoz.org/ | http://www.lp.org/ |
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