Hi Austin -- Did you know about the info page on tar? All you have to do is to type info tar and you get it.
I am considering starting a project which would: a) define a standard template for man pages in Linux. I know it would appear that one already exists, but it turns out that what really, really exists is a good overall description of what should be included in the man pages (in /usr/doc/HOWTO/Mini/Manpages), but that's leaves room for ambiguities, and I believe a template would be a very useful addition. b) begin the slow, laborious process of writing new manpages where they don't exist, then start re-formatting existing man pages to a standard template. Once that happens (this coudl take more than a year) then it seems to em the manpages would be ready for a major overhaul -- i.e., an automatic transformation into hypertext, which could/should be combined with a much more powerful indexing scheme than is currently available through apropos. Perhaps you know of some other progress on this issue. If so, I'd be interested to hear about it. BTW, I did write the man pages for the acct package myself, and have forwarded them to the author for comments and to the package maintainer. It turned out (no surprise) that in the process of doing this, I found a number of ambiguities and actual inaccuracies in the information that had existed. So it produced (I hope) some technical progress as well as straight information transfer. The package developer may take a few days yet, though, to go through all of the stuff I sent him and to change whatever needs changing. That's why you haven't heard more about it. Sorry for such a long email. Susan Kleinmann [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > I know the business of manpages for GNU software is a religious issue, > but tar seems to be missing one. > > A number of different linux systems have manpages for GNU tar, > although the tar package doesn't contain one as such. > > Could a manpage be maintained separately ? > > Austin > >
