man page symlinks on symlinked binary

[Lamont Peterson]

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On Wed, 19 Sep 2007 17:34:27 -0300
Martin Marques <martin at bugs.unl.edu.ar> wrote:

> Lamont Peterson escribió:
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> > On Wed, 19 Sep 2007 21:44:16 +0300
> > Ville Skyttä <ville.skytta at iki.fi> wrote:
> > 
> >> On Wednesday 19 September 2007, Martin Marques wrote:
> >>
> >>> The thing is that the discussion started flipping towards why, if
> >>> there is a binary symlink, there isn't a man page symlink? This
> >>> could, in the case of cdrecord and wodim, or mkisofs and genisofs,
> >>> end in bugtrack tickets for those packages, but I am more
> >>> interested in a general solution, for all packages that have
> >>> binary symlinks.
> >>>
> >>> So, shouldn't there be something in respect of this issue in the
> >>> packaging policy?
> >> I support that (or the more or less AFAIK equivalent 'echo ".so
> >> man1/wodim.1" 
> >>> cdrecord.1' approach as an alternative to symlinks).  Could you
> >>> write a 
> >> draft for that?  I can take it onwards from there in the packaging
> >> committee.
> > 
> > I would suggest creating a cdrecord(1) man page that says "This is
> > no more.  See wodim(1), which replaces it."  Put that cdrecord(1)
> > man page into the wodim package.  This way, we teach people that
> > there's been a change and we don't get "Um, when I type 'man
> > cdrecord' I get a man page for something totally different; what
> > gives?" kinds of questions/bug reports/requests.
> 
> If they read the man they would note that:
> 
> NOTE
> There  may  be  similarities  and  differences between this program
> and other disk recording application(s). See the CREDITS and
> AUTHORS  sec- tions below to learn about the origin of wodim.
> 
> 
> And later that:
> 
> This application is a spinoff  from  the  original  program
> "cdrecord" delivered  in  the cdrtools package [1] created by Joerg
> Schilling, who deserves the most credits for its success. However, he
> is not  involved into the development of this spinoff and therefore
> he shall not be made responsible for any problem caused by it. Do not
> refer to this applica- tion  as  "cdrecord", do not try to get
> support for wodim by contacting the original authors.
> 
> So, better would be to teach users to read the manual.
> 
> This is obviously IMHO.

I honestly do not understand how what you are saying here helps in any way to answer the question being discussed in this thread.  Of course it's best for the users to read the manual.  That's not the point.  We're talking about how to help people find the manual when the name has changed from something (like cdrecord, which prompted this thread in the first place) that has been around a long time.

Of course I saw the item you quoted/mentioned in the wodim(1) man page.  It doesn't help anyone who doesn't know that wodim is what they want because cdrecord no longer exists on their systems (in the distribution).

If I've missed something here, help me understand it.
- -- 
Lamont Peterson <lamont at gurulabs.com>
Senior Instructor
Guru Labs, L.C. [ http://www.GuruLabs.com/ ]

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