Re: man pages and GNOME docs [was Re: gtt suggestions]

[Jim Pick <jim jimpick com>]

Mark Galassi <rosalia@cygnus.com> writes:

> That's quite incorrect.  Some GNU programs have man pages by chance,
> and the GNU coding standards discourage spending time on maintaining
> them: take a look at the documentation part of the GNU coding
> standards -- it's quite explicit.  And in practice most GNU programs
> don't have man pages, especially the recent ones.  Do you find man
> pages for automake or gettext?

It's worth noting that the Debian project considers binaries without
man pages to be a bug.

So if Gnome is successful, us Debian guys are going to probably be
writing man pages anyways.  But it would be better to have them a
standard part of the Gnome documentation requirement (done using
DocBook) - otherwise it will be painful keeping them in sync.  I
personally want to see better documentation than what you'd find in
the typical official GNU software package.

I know that some software authors would rather write code than write
docs - but if we make it painless enough, there ought to be a minimum
standard for a program to be included in the Gnome distribution - and
that should include man pages.

Cheers,

 - Jim

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