Re: Online Help
On Fri, Dec 28, 2001 at 09:10:33AM -0800, Sean 'Shaleh' Perry wrote:
>
> 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.
>
Well, I was careful not to make it a requirement, but just a
suggestion. I think it does meet the criteria of 'most programs
already do it'. It just seems like, if we want to create consistency,
we have to let people know what we want. Otherwise we wouldn't make
any progress.
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| Chris Tillman tillman@azstarnet.com |
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