Man page coverage
I'm really sorry I'm so late on all of this, but just after Karsten
admitted me to the Docs project, I caught a fever, cough, indigestion -
the whole nine yards. Soon after I recovered, the submarine cables
connecting Egypt (where I am for a few months) were cut, so we were
having very unreliable Internet service for the following weekend.
Anyway, excuses aside, the task I was hoping to tackle involved
establishing a sub-project to do complete man-page coverage of existing
packages & applications within Fedora. The discussion started over on
the fedora-devel list, and it seemed that I was the most enthusiastic
about undertaking the project, so that's what I'd like to propose, but
here within the Docs project.
I outlined a few general steps, and you can read up here:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-December/msg00023....
To save you a trip, I'll repost the steps here:
1) Identify which packages are missing man pages altogether in Fedora
-- these should get top priority
-- we can see if Debian or other projects already have some
-- acceptable-licensing-pending, of course
2) Identify which packages having sub-par man pages
-- after fulfilling 1), this should be the next priority
-- similar methodology to 1), find ones that already exist first
3) Develop a "stub" template for packages that have no man pages
available
-- at least we can include command-line arguments, authorship,
web links for more info, etc.
-- at first this isn't much better than -h/--help, but
we can at least let it be a start
4) Once we have all of this information prepared, then we can get to
work on forming a project around this group, preparing a page in the
wiki with the packages that need man pages or whose man pages need
improvement, etc.
5) ???
6) Profit!
So, right now, I'm very green when it comes to working on open-source
projects. I've been using Fedora for a while, but I still can be
somewhat ignorant when it comes to doing some things. I'm a PHP
developer by trade, so I'm not clueless, but you get my point.
What I could use help with from the more experienced would be, for
example, a way to identify the existence of man pages for packages. For
example, is it enough to have a single man page for a package, or do we
want a man page for every executable file? I'm willing to do a fair
share of the work, but I also hope some others are willing to help out
where they can as well. ;)
Okay, that's enough for one e-mail. I just wanted to get the ball
rolling and get started on some of these steps, and see what else anyone
else would like to share in terms of ideas.