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Re: Some small doc bugs in cygwin and tar packages


-------- Original Message --------
> From:
> Sent: Monday, May 29, 2006 8:52 PM
> To:
> Subject: Re: Some small doc bugs in cygwin and tar packages
> > > That's because the upstream tar package does not provide a man page.  I'm
> > > not really inclined to go creating man pages where upstream did not think
> > > they were worth it; you can use 'info tar' instead.
> 
> > OK, I never use man , but a lot of other people seem to.
> > I thought GNU tar was such an old program someone must have got around to 
> > writing a man page for it.
> 
...
> And while tar may be old, some of its options are new (hence it being at
> version 1.15.90 right now), and the upstream maintainer does not
> want to document each new option in the man format, since GNU
> coding standards do not require it.

I agree, I'd probably do the same thing as the tar maintainer if I were maintaining a package like that.
 
> Other packagers have different attitudes; coreutils uses a help2man script
> to convert the --help output into a reasonable man page, and the findutils
> packager actually maintains parallel man and info pages (and tries to
> fix inconsistencies between them whenever they are pointed out).

Yes.  Glibc also tries to do this too.  It doesn't work very well, some facitilies are only mentioned in the info files, others only mentioned in the man pages.
(Anyway, I'm straying from the subject).

>  But
> as packager, my attitude is to do the minimal amount of work above
> what the upstream maintainer does.

Fair enough

> > 
> > The issue with installing both .info.gz and .info- files though I think is a 
> > real bug.  Info readers should show one or the other, but I don't think there 
> > will be any gaurantee which.  It seemed to put Emacs in a tizzy on my machine 
> > anyway.
> 
> But that problem wasn't related to the tar package, so I can't
> do anything about it.

The tar packages 1.15.1-4 and 1.5.90 presently have in them...
One info file called "tar.info.gz" which is correctly formatted.
Another two info files called "tar.info-1" and "tar.info-2" which duplicate the material in "tar.info.gz".  These are not named correctly, the first should be "tar.info" and the second "tar.info-1"
I think there should only be one info file, it doesn't matter what sort, and it should be named in the conventional way.

(The cygwin-doc files are similar, but that's a separate issue)

Sorry for breaking mailing list rules.

Thanks,
Rob





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