Re: man pages
Trond Eivind Glomsrød <teg@redhat.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 22 Jul 2001, Joerg Schilling wrote:
>
> > >A manpage should cover arguments for the program - covering the entire
> > >behaviour is way beyond the scope of a manpage.
> >
> > But the fact that ~ 25% of the programs in a Linux distribution has no man page
> > at all it not good.
>
> The LSB is about providing an environment for programs - not about what is
> in the distributions themselves.
The LSB is (among other things) concerned with the location of various
files that belong to a package. A program can not be labeled
"lsb-compliant" if it does not fulfill certain requirements. The LSB's
purpose is "to enable a uniform industry standard environment".
Granted, there is no mention of man-pages or other forms of
documentation in this definition, yet I believe that to "enable a
uniform industry standard environment", one needs documentation for each
tool/application.
Now the man-pages have been an accepted standard (or as close to a
standard as you can get) in the entire unix-world, and I would certainly
believe that the existence of a man-page for any application contributes
to enabling a uniform environment.
Making the existence of a man-page for every LSB-application mandatory
would, IMHO, only be of advantage to the end-user. The format of the
man-pages could be determined to be as brief as
name - short description
long description
options
author
as a minimum-requirement.
-Jan
--
Jan Schaumann
http://www.netmeister.org
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