Re: undocumented.7 being abused
On Sat, Jan 20, 2001 at 07:37:10PM +0100, Marcelo E. Magallon wrote:
> 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...
No, reporting the missing man pages as a bug is different than
reporting the policy violation of not having a bug report on file.
The use of undocumented(7) might not allow you to close the former bug
report, but would allow you to close the latter. There is no paradox.
> 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.
The previous lintian maintainer was considering the idea of making the
use of undocumented(7) a warning. (Which seems appropriate, since you
do have to have a bug report on file, which means that it's something
you *should* fix.) With the switch in maintainers, this plan seems to
have gotten lost, or at least delayed.
> Before proposing to get rid of this, I'd like to hear opinions as to
> why we should allow the use of undocumented.7
A couple of proposals to get rid of undocumented(7) have already gone
by, without conclusion. The fact that it was being debated is part of
the reason that the warning never made it into lintian (the old
maintainer was hoping that it would end up being a more serious bug).
As an opponent of undocumented(7) myself, I would like to hold off on
this debate until we can get lintian updated.
Now that you've reminded me, I'll try looking through lintian and see
if I can come up with a patch. (I know that would make the new
maintainer happy.)
--
Chris Waters | Pneumonoultra- osis is too long
xtifr@debian.org | microscopicsilico- to fit into a single
or xtifr@dsp.net | volcaniconi- standalone haiku
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