Bug#39830: [AMENDMENT]: get rid of undocumented(7) symlinks
On Wed, Nov 13, 2002 at 08:40:21PM +1100, Herbert Xu wrote:
> Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> wrote:
> > I personally find the undocumented (7) man page frustrating,
> > since I expected to see documentation, and was told there was none
> > after a wait (yes, I had a slow machine). I would have much rather
> > not had my hopes raised, and that man itself told me there was no
> > manual page.
>
> How about if we made this configurable:
>
> Move undocumented.7.gz to undocumented.real.7.gz
>
> Create a symlink from the former to the latter in the postinst upon
> installation or upgrading from a version without it. Then people
> who don't want to see it can simply delete the symlink.
>
> They would get a warning from man of course, but that should be easy
> to special case in man(1).
I think dangling symlinks in place of man pages are bugs, and would
greatly prefer not to special-case such things in man-db. One of the
reasons I like this proposal is that it gets rid of the farm of dangling
symlinks when the manpages package isn't installed.
> Personally I think the manual page would be useful to users new
> to Debian.
Indeed, and I think that the manual page should stay and be referred to
in other ways (e.g. in the "No manual entry for foo" message, as I
suggested earlier). This proposal just removes the obligation to create
the undocumented(7) symlinks.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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