On Tue, 2024-02-20 at 17:02 +0000, José Abílio Matos wrote:
On Monday, 19 February 2024 10.32.23 WET Patrick O'Callaghan
wrote:
> No, I'd rather there was a policy of requiring man pages, along
> with
> the other policies regarding what is accepted in Fedora.
I my humble opinion man pages are the wrong answer for the right
problem.
That is why more and more packages, in this case command line
interface
programs, use inline help. There are several programs where you get
help with
the --help but there is no man page. Another challenge is to need to
make into
sync between both formats.
Man pages are not portable across different operating systems, they
come from
unix tradition, they suffer from several idiosyncratic, pardon
historical,
choices. They do not have hyper-link capabilities and so on.
I strongly disagree with this. In what sense are text files "not
portable"? Why should it be a requirement for a system to be online
before you can read the documentation? Why does reading the docs imply
you have to use a GUI and pointing device? All of these things have
their place, but IMHO it's of great benefit that everything the user
can see or touch to have at least high-level documentation of what it
does, with instructions on how to go deeper, available in even the most
basic interface and locally searchable (inline '--help' options are not
a substitute). That's not the case with a significant number of KDE
apps (and others of course, but that's by the by).
poc