Felix Miata:
What's needed is incentive for code creators to simultaneously
document, with ample examples that man pages usually omit, even if
it's only in formal, non-wikified docs that wikis can point to.
Gene Heskett:
It should be an iron-clad rule that a developer submitting his itch
scratcher code to a distribution must be subscribed to that
distributions user list BEFORE he can commit.
That does not work and does not scale. What would work is what M. Miata
said, which is to inculcate in software developers a culture of always
providing doco with the software, and regarding the job as not complete
unless there is doco.
That said, an obscure page (which people even in this thread were hard
pressed to find) on someone else's wiki does not really count.
Furthermore: In this *particular* regard, the developer-provided doco
actually *is* clear. The upstart manual page for inittab has been
warning that the file is obsolete for over ten years, and that manual
page is copied all over the WWW making it fairly easy to come across.
(Examples: https://linux.die.net/man/5/inittab
https://askubuntu.com/questions/34308/
https://serverfault.com/questions/147430/
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/man5/inittab.5.html)
The systemd people have not explicitly documented inittab, as the
upstart people did, although they have explicitly documented run levels
as "obsolete" in the systemd manual page for runlevel. This, too, has
been copied around the WWW, albeit somewhat less. (Examples:
https://manpages.debian.org/stretch/systemd-sysv/runlevel.8.en.html
http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/runlevel.8.html
https://www.mankier.com/8/runlevel)
I for one have been attempting spreading the word about inittab, too.
* http://jdebp.eu./FGA/inittab-is-history.html
* http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/guide/introduction.html
* https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/248313/5132
* https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/196197/5132
* https://askubuntu.com/a/834323/43344
* http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/guide/runlevel.html
In this particular case, one cannot really level the charge of
developers not documenting this. It is amply documented, by developers
of multiple projects, in their manual pages in their handbooks/guides
and on their WWW sites, for over a decade. The deficiencies of Debian's
own wiki cannot legitimately be laid at the feet of the developers of
the various softwares.
One such developer even tried to donate to you an update to the Debian
Policy Manual that explained both /etc/inittab (in section 9.3.4) and
the changes that arrived in 2014, to replace your woefully outdated one:
* http://jdebp.eu./Proposals/DebianPolicy/
