Re: Online Help

["Sean 'Shaleh' Perry" <shalehperry@attbi.com>]

On 28-Dec-2001 Chris Tillman wrote:
> First, a caveat: I'm not a dd, and have only been involved with Debian
> and Linux for around 8 months.
> 
> That makes me uniquely qualified :-) to suggest some kind of
> standardization for online help be implemented in policy for console
> programs.
> 

This goes well beyond Debian's means.  Enforcing this means a patch to every
upstream who does not support --help (and remember two dashes is a GNUism,
-help was there first).  While I applaud the idea and would create such a patch
for any software I use, Debian simply can not do this.  We have enough problems
releasing something.  This goes doubly for X apps.  KDE and GNOME have their
standards, everyone else just plays with their own toys.  We can not force them
to act in certain ways.  Asking the Debian developer to maintain local code to
support this is asking them to do a lot more work than many have time for.

As for lintian, it is meant as a DEBIAN checking tool.  What little analysis it
does of upstream code is requireed for sanity.  The real intent is to make sure
developers do not upload obviously broken packages.