manpath.be, man page package checks/policy

[Georg Sauthoff]

Hello,

so I've created https://manpath.be - a site that provides access to the
man pages of several distributions - including several Fedora and CentOS
versions.

See also its about page https://manpath.be/about for some of its
features (e.g. permalinks, short links, reverse links ...).


While working on this project I noticed a few issues with the man pages
of Fedora packages:

Some packages include man pages auto-generated by doxygen. In my
experience, those man pages are usually pretty human un-readable and
thus quite useless. Thus, I exclude them from manpath.be.

Example: LAPACKE_cgges3_work(3) from the lapack package

That package contains 10 thousand or so auto-generated man pages.

Perhaps it makes sense to recommend packagers to exclude doxygen
generated man pages from Fedora packages. For example, as part of the
packaging policy.


Perhaps it also makes sense to add some man-page related checks to
rpmlint or fedora-review (?), e.g. to check

- if a package creates sub-directories under /usr/share/man/man*/
  Example: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1722350
- if a man page is empty
- if a man page redirects to itself
  Example: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1720942
- if a man page has non-standard suffixes like 1.orig.gz instead of 1.gz
- if the suffix of a man page matches the one of its subdirectory
  Examples: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1722440
            https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1722447
- if a man page contains verbatim escape sequences
  Example: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1725301
- if the man page display produces groff/grotty warnings/errors
  Example: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1725402

Thoughts?

Best regards
Georg