Trond Eivind Glomsrød <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Sun, 22 Jul 2001, Joerg Schilling wrote: > > > >A manpage should cover arguments for the program - covering the entire > > >behaviour is way beyond the scope of a manpage. > > > > But the fact that ~ 25% of the programs in a Linux distribution has no man > > page > > at all it not good. > > The LSB is about providing an environment for programs - not about what is > in the distributions themselves.
The LSB is (among other things) concerned with the location of various files that belong to a package. A program can not be labeled "lsb-compliant" if it does not fulfill certain requirements. The LSB's purpose is "to enable a uniform industry standard environment". Granted, there is no mention of man-pages or other forms of documentation in this definition, yet I believe that to "enable a uniform industry standard environment", one needs documentation for each tool/application. Now the man-pages have been an accepted standard (or as close to a standard as you can get) in the entire unix-world, and I would certainly believe that the existence of a man-page for any application contributes to enabling a uniform environment. Making the existence of a man-page for every LSB-application mandatory would, IMHO, only be of advantage to the end-user. The format of the man-pages could be determined to be as brief as name - short description long description options author as a minimum-requirement. -Jan -- Jan Schaumann http://www.netmeister.org
