On Sat, Dec 15, 2007 at 09:14:38AM +1100, Robert Thorsby wrote: > Add to this, *roff does not conform to The Debian Way (which includes > derivatives, such as *buntu). This means that *roff is deprecated, and > therefore obsolete.
For the record, I have no idea where this comes from, and it definitely doesn't correspond to either Debian policy or Ubuntu policy. (I am the Debian groff maintainer as well as the manager of the Ubuntu platform team.) Most times I see the term "The Debian Way" used, it's by a Debian user rather than a Debian developer, and often doesn't match up with what I'd consider to be the state of the art even if it's a good idea at all! And of course folks using Debian aren't obliged to conform to the current state of the art either. It sounds like either you're making some sarcastic point that I've missed, or your gripe is based on a bad experience with individual maintainers. To put that into perspective, here's an excerpt from Debian policy: You should install manual pages in nroff source form, in appropriate places under /usr/share/man. You should only use sections 1 to 9 (see the FHS for more details). You must not install a pre-formatted "cat page". Each program, utility, and function should have an associated manual page included in the same package. It is suggested that all configuration files also have a manual page included as well. Manual pages for protocols and other auxiliary things are optional. If no manual page is available, this is considered as a bug and should be reported to the Debian Bug Tracking System (the maintainer of the package is allowed to write this bug report themselves, if they so desire). Do not close the bug report until a proper man page is available. You may forward a complaint about a missing man page to the upstream authors, and mark the bug as forwarded in the Debian bug tracking system. Even though the GNU Project do not in general consider the lack of a man page to be a bug, we do; if they tell you that they don't consider it a bug you should leave the bug in our bug tracking system open anyway. That's about as far from "deprecated, and therefore obsolete" as you can get. > Note, often *buntu does not include man pages for many applications, > even when the man pages are particularly well documented, thus > **proving** that *roff is obsolete. If manual pages are available and not distributed, that's a bug and should be filed as such. If they don't exist, that's still a bug, though not necessarily an urgent one. Feel free to refer incorrect rejections of such bugs to me (at the other hat, [EMAIL PROTECTED]), and I will happily take them up with the rejectors. Cheers, -- Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
