On Tue, 18 Jan 2000, Matthew Vernon wrote: > It's tricky to write a decent manpage if you know no nroff.
You don't have to learn all the nroff macros to write a simple man page! Have a look at the manpage-HOWTO (http://www.schweikhardt.net/man_page_howto.html) or man(7) and you will see, that you need a very limited set of macros to write man pages. IMHO this can be learned in only one hour (or less) and it is not harder than learning how to write a control file or how to write a docbase file or something like this. And don't forget, that you don't have to learn it again for every man page, you can reuse your knowledge for every new man page ;-) > Besides foo --help is often all you need to get at least basic > functionality from a package. So use help2man and add a short description what this binary does. Should a user start an unknown program foo with the option --help only to find out, that --help isn't supported, but foo always removes/files some files in his home? Before I start an unknown program, I want to know, what it is expected to do. For this I need a man page, where I can find out, what the program does (at least a link to some documentation, which tells me). > Or, in the case of beta software, the author says "Developers should > be able to manage with the commented header file. I'll write more > documentation at a later stage", I'm inclined to agree with > upstream, and provide the header file in the appropriate place, with > a comment in Readme.Debian. And why can't you write this into a man page? BTW: the upstream maintainer will be happy, if you help him writing the documentation, so he can concentrate on improving the program. Ciao Roland -- * [EMAIL PROTECTED] * http://www.spinnaker.de/ *
