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Bug#1094145: debian-policy: Remove or significantly minimize manual page requirement



Hello Jeremy,

It's very annoying when you install something and try to 'man foo' and
you don't get documentation.  I don't think that situation has got any
less annoying over the past twenty years.  It makes the system we are
producing less useful.

I don't think the fact that we have many open Lintian warnings about
this indicates a consensus that these manpages don't matter.  It just
indicates that there is always more work to be done than people able to
do it.

Packages being "Lintian clean" should not itself be a goal.
I think we should be doing a better job of letting new contributors know
that Lintian only make suggestions, and they can use their own
judgements about how to spend their time.

I think possibly we could weaken the requirement for GUI programs.
It's still annoying when they do have options and you want to know what
they are (or, you want to know that there aren't any options, so you
can't solve your problem that way) but it's less bad than for CLI
programs.  So maybe we could weaken the language down from 'should' for
GUI programs.

-- 
Sean Whitton

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