Re: help wanted! get involved! make Debian-women work!
On Mon, Jul 12, 2004 at 04:56:05PM +0100, Helen Faulkner wrote:
> Just looked at the list. How come there are missing manpages for a
> bunch of kde things that presumably have instructions in the kde user
> manuals that you get to through the help menu. An example is kedit. I
> would have thought there was some tool that translated those
> instructions into manpages. Aren't there a bunch of tools that do that
> kind of thing?
I don't know if there's a tool that's out there for it. Apparently not, since
we don't have any manpages for these apps :-) I suppose that would be a good
exercise for some budding scripter out there.
> Just wondering. I guess I can see myself writing the odd manpage for
> something that already had instructions. Writing one for something that
> didn't have any documentation would be a lot harder - you'd have to know
> everything it does or wade through the code, I assume.
Yes, it's much easier translating already existing documentation in to a
manpage. For example, for my first manpage I had to do this from the
instructions in a README file. Another manpage I wrote, I used the --help
switch from the app itself to figure out what to document. Another time I
didn't have these options, so I had to go in to the source code itself to
figure out what the program did and document it. It pretty much depends on the
circumstances. One good idea if you're unsure is to send the manpage to the
upstream author and ask them to check it for you. It's not unlikely that
they'll include it in the next release of their app too.
- David Nusinow
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