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Re: Custom undocumented(7)s are just as bad.



Seth R Arnold <sarnold@willamette.edu> writes:
> On Sat, Jan 29, 2000 at 09:33:54AM -0500, Michael Stone wrote:
> > On Sat, Jan 29, 2000 at 03:23:27PM +1100, Brian May wrote:

> > > I disagree. Take Heimdal for instance. It is a very complicated
> > > package (at least by my standards), has numerous libraries and
> > > clients. Most of the binaries are obvious, eg telnet, ftp, and even
> > > come with man pages. However, some don't, eg, des, verify_krb5_conf,
> > > string2key.

> > I disagree with your disagreement. If you don't know what the binaries
> > do, how is the user supposed to know? It's your job to do the research
> > so every user doesn't have to do it on his own. I agre with manoj that
> > maintainers should not be packaging things they don't understand--that
> > just has all sorts of bad implications.

> Manoj, Michael, I can see where you are coming from, and it makes a good
> deal of sense -- but part of me thinks it is folly to require *that* level
> of understanding before packaging a program, and expect it after being
> packaged.

I don't think we're asking for full understanding here.  We don't need
an in-depth man page -- a quick summary of usage (which should be easy
to figure out) and a comment that this is part of package X, but is
not well documented will probably do in a pinch.  And will be a HUGE
improvement over no man page OR undocumented(7).
-- 
Chris Waters   xtifr@dsp.net | I have a truly elegant proof of the
      or    xtifr@debian.org | above, but it is too long to fit into
http://www.dsp.net/xtifr     | this .signature file.


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