Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler(a)chello.at> writes:
Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote:
> I think you are reading it much to literally.
The policy you're proposing (and incidentally, also the Debian policy) is
that literal. Requiring good documentation makes sense (though it's hard to
define "good documentation"). Requiring it to be in manpage format and to
document the command-line options (and not requiring anything else), even
for GUI apps, doesn't.
If the problem is that troff is too arcane (and I'll be the first to
admit it -- I hate it) then that needs fixing. I don't think it would
matter that much what the source for the manpage looked like as long as
"man someprogram" would dig up the documentation and display it in a
similar looking format.
The problem currently is some of the docs are accessible by man(1), some
by info(1) and others by grovelling around /usr/share/doc/ . Instead of
the computer doing the work and finding the documentation and displaying
it, the user must. Old hacks might know all the places to look, but
newbies sure wouldn't.
;-)
That is a good example of a contentless man page. I assume it was
written by some 3rd party that didn't really understand what the program
did, how it was meant to be used etc.
-wolfgang
--
Wolfgang S. Rupprecht Android 1.5 (Cupcake) and Fedora-11