On Sun, Feb 06, 2000 at 06:33:04PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote:
> > a) If the maintainer does not know what every binary in the common
> > PATH is doing, he should give the package to someone who is
> > willing to spend the time to learn the package.
>
> I guess I need to put xbase-clients up for adoption then.
>
> I've run the programs and even glanced over the source and STILL don't
> enough to write a decent manpage for xkbbell, xkbvleds, or xkbwatch.
I'm a quakeforge upstream coder as well as the Debian person and I still
absolutely haven't got a clue what a good selection of the command line
options and cvars do. ;>
(Of course we also freely admit this is an early beta and that much is
subject to change just as soon as we figure out how---the evil inherent in
the cmdline parser is almost unfathomable. This to say nothing of the
evil in the menu system or the haphazard/inconsistant cvar names..)
In general, I do think there are cases when manpages may not exist for a
binary. This non-existance may be a serious problem or it may not be, and
that's very much a case-dependant thing. I haven't written a manpage for
epic4's "wserv" and I have no intention of doing so. RTFS if you want to
know how to run it--you never should anyway. (It's in /usr/lib for a
reason...)
After reading this thread and others like it, I'm becoming convinced the
people who say undocumented(7) is more trouble than it's worth are right
and the use of that page should be deprecated. Some of my own packages
rely on it to silence lintian errors--and this is something I think I will
change in potato. While there not being a manpage IS a problem in most of
these cases, I can no longer believe undocumented(7) is an adiquate
solution.
--
Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@debian.org> Debian Linux developer
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