Re: man --> info?
On Wed, May 17, 2000 at 10:06:33AM -0500, Gregory Guthrie wrote:
> At 05:19 PM 05/17/2000 +0300, Fabrizio Polacco wrote:
> >On Tue, May 16, 2000 at 06:50:43AM -0500, Gregory Guthrie wrote:
> > > Why are man pages abandoned for info?
> >
> >Only FSF do that. Debian _requires_ manpages for all.
> -- but many man pages say "not maintained, use info."
>
> so it is not just formatting them, but getting the relevant info.
>
> BUGS
> The GNU folks, in general, abhor man pages, and create
> info documents instead.
info docs are "guides", while manpages are pages of the reference
manual. Both type of docs are needed, as they serve different purposes,
but only the reference is required.
That attitude, to abhor reference manuals in favor of on-line guides, is
like pretending to conversate only with persons with the same level of
knowledge as you.
> The maintainer of tar falls into
> this category. This man page is neither complete, nor
> current, and was included in the Debian Linux packaging of
> tar entirely to reduce the frequency with which the lack
> of a man page gets reported as a bug in our defect track
> ing system.
I would report this as a bug in "mentality".
The sentence above do not explains if the "maintainer" which falls in
this category is the "upstream" maintainer or the Debian one.
In the second case I would seriously object to his adherence to the
spirit of the distribution.
>
> If you really want to understand tar, then you should run
> info and read the tar info pages, or use the info mode in
> emacs.
Which goes back to the real problem.
I, for instance, have always big problem because _any_ upgrade wants
absolutely to install emacs.
This hurt me so many times that I was sometimes tempted to launch a
project to de-GNUify Debian, not in the anti-Freeness: in fact I'm
trying hardly to assign man-db copyright to the FSF, but in the
non-emacs/lisp/texinfo rebellion! I want FSF to spouse vi.
But then I realize how childish it would seem, and I forget about it.
Until the next upgrade :-)
Going back to the problem above, the very right solution is to write the
corret manpage and submit it as a patch to the debian maintainer. If he
refuses, raise the problem on debian-devel, and ask for NMU.
Now they do not have an excuse any-more. FSF has added a info2man
program that extract the manpage from the texinfo source!
I think it's a duty of the debian maintainer to keep his packages
in-line with the policy. It can be boring sometimes, as with email
packages where the debian maintainer has to introduce changes to the
sources to comply with the debian policy about locks, or with lib
packages, where the debian maintainer has to reorganize the way the lib
is built to comply with the debian requirement of shipping several and
different types of the same library.
It's part of the job. Nobody is forced to do it, but if you want to do
it, you have to follow these rules.
fab
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