Hi! On Sat, 2025-01-25 at 11:21:18 +0100, Bill Allombert wrote: > On Fri, Jan 24, 2025 at 08:16:29PM -0500, Jeremy Bícha wrote: > > - Many new contributors to Debian in an attempt to get their new > > package "Lintian clean" spend significant time creating a manpage for > > their app, often a GUI app with no command line options. The manpage > > does not really have useful content. > > > - Many open bugs exist requesting manpages for apps where it may > > similarly not be needed. > > The man page provides a link between the executable name and the app. > This is useful in a lot of situation. Writing such a manpage is not > a waste of time.
I agree that man pages are extremely useful. Even for GUI applications, which some times do not have complete --help output, or not even any option showing a usage output at all, where they might still support parsing some options. And where even if they have no support at all for any CLI options, then I think it's still useful to document briefly (say a tiny paragraph) what they do (more so if its name is very cryptic), what environment variables they might honor, and what files they might be using, such as configuration file locations or similar. I think it's fine if maintainers do not have the time and/or motivation to write these themselves, but I still find their omission to be a bug. > Maybe we need a tool dh_help2man that would automatically build man pages. > using ---help and the synopsis in debian/control. I'd like us to try to step away from help2man as part of our build processes, because it does not play nice with cross-compilation, and requires to build the tools twice (once for the build and once for the host architectures), which complicates things substantially. I think using this as an initial template is fine though, or perhaps as a rune that the maintainer uses after each new upstream release and then imports into the packaging. Ideally upstream would be convinced to ship those though. :) Thanks, Guillem
