It seems pointless, in my opinion, to put information common to all packages into the man page of each. This is like requiring all car license tags to say "car" on them. Well, we already KNOW that much.
(As an aside, ISBNs do not come from the Library of Congress, but actually come from the for-profit publisher of Books in Print. What the LOC issues are "Cataloging in Publication" numbers which make it easy to retrieve card catalog information. There is not a one-to-one correspondence, either, since different ISBNs issue for different bindings or for annual editions, while the same CIP number is retained.) -- Mike On 2000-05-19 at 17:27 -0700, Joey Hess wrote: > Jim Lynch wrote: * * * > Useless and bloating because it > increases the size of each package with what is effectively the output > of "dpkg -L package |egrep 'usr/share/doc|usr/share/info|usr/share/man'". * * * > > (b) the documentation list (as in (1)) could be altered to refer > > to the material, either by URL or other absolute pointer, > > such as an ISBN number for a book. > > This is already done to some degree. To absolutly require it places > unacceptable demands on the debian maintainer. I should not have to > contact the Library of Congress to get a list of all ISBN's related to a > package, before packaging it. * * * > What do folks think?
