Note on man pages

[Kevin Kofler]

Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Debian has a policy that all the commands should have man pages as part
> of their review process. Unfortunately they don't seem to be sending it
> upstream. If you are a package maintainer for some application, that is
> missing a man page, it might be a good to look into the Debian sources
> for man page patches, add them to your package and send it upstream as
> well. Note that upstream might require you to clean up the man page in
> the process.

Well, there are many upstreams rejecting Debian's patches outright, saying
manpages are obsolete and redundant with any of:
* info documentation (those are mostly the GNU projects),
* HTML/docbook/GUI documentation (that has long been KDE's position, but
recently they have started merging manpages from Debian),
* plaintext documentation or
* --help or other usage output.

        Kevin Kofler