Jeremy Bícha <[email protected]> writes: > The manpage does not really have useful content.
as a user i both agree and disagree with this: i agree that documentation is not very good, but i disagree that nothing would be better than something. Even if people dont use man themselves, the man-page online is often the only thing you can find about a package. i suspect that most packages give you no clue how to use them at all: being able to type "man <packagename>TAB" is sometimes a good clue to what the command is, and how to use it. Id rather have a man-page that says "Run command --help for information" or "this is started automatically" or "Read README.Debian.gz" than nothing at all. as a newcomer myself i do not find writing manpages is difficult - you can copy the structure from other manpages (i usually look at ls(1) or git(1)), and test with "man -l". it may not be amazing and may not have nice markup etc, but if someone can't do that much then i wonder how well they are really doing the other packaging tasks: are they perhaps just "trying stuff" until it "seems to work", and then falling at this stage which requires a bit of research and understanding? Maybe debian could provide a basic template man-page that could be used, if that would help? (isnt there one from dh-make already?) (i would agree that writing *good* documentation is hard, but something is better than nothing)
