Debian bug report logs - #1801
tar manpage missing

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To: Austin Donnelly <and1000@cam.ac.uk>, debian-bugs@Pixar.com
Subject: Re: Bug#1801: tar manpage missing 
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 04 Nov 1995 15:28:29 GMT."
             <Pine.LNX.3.91.951104152010.483A-100000@valour.pem.cam.ac.uk> 
Date: Sat, 04 Nov 1995 10:56:22 -0500
From: "Susan G. Kleinmann" <sgk@zork.tiac.net>

Hi Austin --
Did you know about the info page on tar?
All you have to do is to type
info tar
and you get it.

I am considering starting a project which would:
a) define a standard template for man pages in Linux.  I know it would
appear that one already exists, but it turns out that what really, really
exists is a good overall description of what should be included in the
man pages (in /usr/doc/HOWTO/Mini/Manpages), but that's leaves room
for ambiguities, and I believe a template would be a very useful addition.
b) begin the slow, laborious process of writing new manpages where they
don't exist, then start re-formatting existing man pages to a standard 
template.

Once that happens (this coudl take more than a year) then it seems to em
the manpages would be ready for a major overhaul -- i.e., an automatic
transformation into hypertext, which could/should be combined with a 
much more powerful indexing scheme than is currently available through
apropos.  

Perhaps you know of some other progress on this issue.  If so, I'd
be interested to hear about it.

BTW, I did write the man pages for the acct package myself, and have
forwarded them to the author for comments and to the package maintainer.
It turned out (no surprise) that in the process of doing this, I found a
number of ambiguities and actual inaccuracies in the information that
had existed.  So it produced (I hope) some technical progress as well
as straight information transfer.  The package developer may take a few
days yet, though, to go through all of the stuff I sent him and to
change whatever needs changing.  That's why you haven't heard more about
it.

Sorry for such a long email.
Susan Kleinmann
sgk@sgk.tiac.net
> 
> I know the business of manpages for GNU software is a religious issue,
> but tar seems to be missing one.
> 
> A number of different linux systems have manpages for GNU tar,
> although the tar package doesn't contain one as such.
> 
> Could a manpage be maintained separately ?
> 
> Austin
> 
> 

Message received at debian-bugs:

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Date: Sat, 4 Nov 1995 15:28:29 +0000 (GMT)
From: Austin Donnelly <and1000@cam.ac.uk>
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Subject: tar manpage missing
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I know the business of manpages for GNU software is a religious issue,
but tar seems to be missing one.

A number of different linux systems have manpages for GNU tar,
although the tar package doesn't contain one as such.

Could a manpage be maintained separately ?

Austin

Your message didn't have a Package: line at the start (in the pseudo-header following the real mail header), or didn't have a psuedo-header at all.

This makes it much harder for us to categorise and deal with your problem report; please ensure that you say which package(s) and version(s) the problem is with next time. Some time in the future the problem reports system may start rejecting such messages.

Full text available.