undocumented.7 being abused

["Marcelo E. Magallon" <mmagallo@debian.org>]

Hi,

 while trying to reproduce a bug against Window Maker, I had to install
 gnome-panel.  If one looks at the packages contents, one gets:

 /.
 /usr
 /usr/share
 /usr/share/doc
 /usr/share/doc/gnome-panel
 /usr/share/doc/gnome-panel/copyright
 /usr/share/doc/gnome-panel/changelog.gz
 /usr/share/doc/gnome-panel/changelog.Debian.gz
 /usr/share/idl
 /usr/share/idl/gnome-panel.idl
 /usr/share/man
 /usr/share/man/man1
 /usr/bin
 /usr/bin/panel
 /usr/bin/gmenu
 /usr/bin/deskguide_applet
 /usr/bin/tasklist_applet
 /usr/bin/gnome-panel-properties-capplet
 /etc
 /etc/CORBA
 /etc/CORBA/servers
 /etc/CORBA/servers/deskguide_applet.gnorba
 /etc/CORBA/servers/fish_applet.gnorba
 /etc/CORBA/servers/tasklist_applet.gnorba
 /etc/CORBA/servers/panel.gnorba
 /etc/CORBA/servers/gen_util.gnorba
 /etc/sound
 /etc/sound/events
 /etc/sound/events/panel.soundlist
 /etc/menu-methods
 /etc/menu-methods/gnome-panel
 /usr/share/man/man1/deskguide_applet.1.gz
 /usr/share/man/man1/gmenu.1.gz
 /usr/share/man/man1/panel.1.gz
 /usr/share/man/man1/tasklist_applet.1.gz
 /usr/share/man/man1/gnome-panel-properties-capplet.1.gz

 All the manpages are symlinks to undocumented.7.  Looking at the bug
 reports for gnome-panel, this hasn't been reported as a bug, so this is
 a violation of policy.  Of course, reporting this as a violation of
 policy is the same as reporting the missing manpages, which means,
 reporting the bug closes the bug.  Anyway, I'm not interested in the
 paradox...

 The point is, gnome-panel is just an example of this.  What bothers me
 is this doorback in the policy is being abused.  Policy 13.1, paragraph
 4 reads:

      This manpage claims that the lack of a manpage has been reported
      as a bug, so you may only do this if it really has (you can report
      it yourself, if you like).  Do not close the bug report until a
      proper manpage is available.

 Since lintian reports the absence of a manpage as an error, maintainers
 (specially new maintainer) proceed to install a link pointing to
 undocumented.7 instead of actually providing a manpage.  Before
 proposing to get rid of this, I'd like to hear opinions as to why we
 should allow the use of undocumented.7 (instead of, say, a manpage that
 *at least* points to the location of the documentation for a package)

 TIA,

--
Marcelo