man page symlinks on symlinked binary

Martin Marques martin at bugs.unl.edu.ar
Wed Sep 19 20:34:27 UTC 2007


Lamont Peterson escribió:
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> On Wed, 19 Sep 2007 21:44:16 +0300
> Ville Skyttä <ville.skytta at iki.fi> wrote:
> 
>> On Wednesday 19 September 2007, Martin Marques wrote:
>>
>>> The thing is that the discussion started flipping towards why, if
>>> there is a binary symlink, there isn't a man page symlink? This
>>> could, in the case of cdrecord and wodim, or mkisofs and genisofs,
>>> end in bugtrack tickets for those packages, but I am more
>>> interested in a general solution, for all packages that have binary
>>> symlinks.
>>>
>>> So, shouldn't there be something in respect of this issue in the
>>> packaging policy?
>> I support that (or the more or less AFAIK equivalent 'echo ".so
>> man1/wodim.1" 
>>> cdrecord.1' approach as an alternative to symlinks).  Could you
>>> write a 
>> draft for that?  I can take it onwards from there in the packaging
>> committee.
> 
> I would suggest creating a cdrecord(1) man page that says "This is no more.  See wodim(1), which replaces it."  Put that cdrecord(1) man page into the wodim package.  This way, we teach people that there's been a change and we don't get "Um, when I type 'man cdrecord' I get a man page for something totally different; what gives?" kinds of questions/bug reports/requests.

If they read the man they would note that:

NOTE
There  may  be  similarities  and  differences between this program and
other disk recording application(s). See the CREDITS and  AUTHORS  sec-
tions below to learn about the origin of wodim.


And later that:

This application is a spinoff  from  the  original  program  "cdrecord"
delivered  in  the cdrtools package [1] created by Joerg Schilling, who
deserves the most credits for its success. However, he is not  involved
into the development of this spinoff and therefore he shall not be made
responsible for any problem caused by it. Do not refer to this applica-
tion  as  "cdrecord", do not try to get support for wodim by contacting
the original authors.

So, better would be to teach users to read the manual.

This is obviously IMHO.


> - -- 
> Lamont Peterson <lamont at gurulabs.com>
> Senior Instructor
> Guru Labs, L.C. [ http://www.GuruLabs.com/ ]
> 
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