On Sat, 2010-02-27 at 11:14 -0800, Russ Allbery wrote: > Josselin Mouette <j...@debian.org> writes: > > > GUI applications usually take only a few simple command-line options, > > and more importantly, when you use a modern development framework, these > > options will always be documented correctly with the --help switch. > > Manual pages, OTOH, are not maintained properly by upstream developers. > > > I think it is a waste of time to write manual pages that won’t be > > maintained upstream, and that won’t contain more useful information than > > --help. The purpose of a manual page is to document precisely the > > behavior of a program, and for GUI applications there is usually an > > associated GUI documentation instead.
manpages can prove to be useful in many situation and they have a few nice features: 1. "man" offer a consistent API. (as opposed to -h/--help/-help/--usage/ --help-foo, --help-bar, etc). 2. whatis foo 3. apropos bar 4. reading the manpage doesn't require to execute the program - it's safe to be run as root - it's doesn't create dummy .foo files - it never spawns any background process > If the flags are properly documented with --help, isn't it usually fairly > trivial to generate a man page using help2man? And if it isn't trivial, it probably isn't trivial for humans either. Franklin -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/1267304202.7886.2868.ca...@solid.paris.klabs.be
