On Sat, Jan 25, 2025 at 10:23:01AM -0500, Jeremy Bícha wrote: > On Sat, Jan 25, 2025 at 5:21 AM Bill Allombert <ballo...@debian.org> wrote: > > The man page provides a link between the executable name and the app. > > This is useful in a lot of situation. Writing such a manpage is not > > a waste of time. > > I think apps already have .desktop files that provide that link.
How do you match a binary to a desktop file ? It is far from obvious or natural, and GUI packages tend to carry extra binaries that are not in any .desktop files. > As an example of how new contributors are taking time to make manpages > that are not helpful only to silence a Lintian warning, see > https://salsa.debian.org/danialbehzadi/showtime/-/blob/debian/latest/debian/showtime.1 > which was created today. > > For an example of an app that I don't believe needs a manpage, see > gnome-clocks. It provides useful information about itself in the About > dialog and in the user Help, both can be easily accessed in the ☰ > menu. Not before you run it, assuming it will even start, which can cause annoying side effect (for example, playing sound, creating files in ~/.config, etc.). We should not need to run an app before having an idea of what it does. > I think manpages can be helpful for command line utilities. I use > manpages myself frequently. I especially appreciate > https://manpages.debian.org/ which allows me to make use of > documentation without needing to install anything. > > My opinion is that current Debian Policy and the associated Lintian > warning are encouraging Debian contributors to simply run help2man, > either in debian/rules or once when they create an initial package. I > am skeptical whether help2man provides value. I am skeptical whether > Debian-specific manpages provide value. They do add value, because at least 'man foo' says something, and it is unsafe to run a random binary with the option --help just to see what happens. Cheers, -- Bill. <ballo...@debian.org> Imagine a large red swirl here.
