I think undocumented(7) does serve a useful purpose, particularly when the program does have useful documentation in another format. However, I also think policy should prohibit the use of undocumented(7) by Debian native packages. Debian has made a statement (elsewhere in the policy documents) that we consider man pages an essential element of programs, and I think we should practice what we preach.
I suspect few, if any, native packages infringe upon this proposed policy; so much the better. But I do think we have a stronger case for asking upstream authors to include man pages if we do it for all the packages in our distribution that we write ourselves. I'm not formally proposing this idea; at the moment, it's a trial balloon to see if we can get some agreement on a process in which we document everything by woody+1 at the latest. (Incidentally, at least one of my Debian man pages has propogated upstream and has been useful for other distributions. We probably should write proper man pages as a contribution to the upstream author's work, in addition to our commitment to our users.) Chris -- ============================================================================= | Chris Lawrence | Get rid of Roger Wicker this year! | | <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | http://www.lordsutch.com/ms-one/ | | | | | Open Directory Editor | Are you tired of politics as usual? | | http://dmoz.org/ | http://www.lp.org/ | =============================================================================
