Re: Bug#1094145: debian-policy: Remove or significantly minimize manual page requirement
Jeremy Bícha <jeremy.bicha@canonical.com> writes:
> The manpage does not really have useful content.
as a user i both agree and disagree with this: i agree that
documentation is not very good, but i disagree that nothing would be
better than something. Even if people dont use man themselves, the
man-page online is often the only thing you can find about a package.
i suspect that most packages give you no clue how to use them at all:
being able to type "man <packagename>TAB" is sometimes a good clue to
what the command is, and how to use it. Id rather have a man-page that
says "Run command --help for information" or "this is started
automatically" or "Read README.Debian.gz" than nothing at all.
as a newcomer myself i do not find writing manpages is difficult - you
can copy the structure from other manpages (i usually look at ls(1) or
git(1)), and test with "man -l". it may not be amazing and may not have
nice markup etc, but if someone can't do that much then i wonder how
well they are really doing the other packaging tasks: are they perhaps
just "trying stuff" until it "seems to work", and then falling at this
stage which requires a bit of research and understanding?
Maybe debian could provide a basic template man-page that could be used,
if that would help? (isnt there one from dh-make already?)
(i would agree that writing *good* documentation is hard, but something
is better than nothing)
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