Re: undocumented man pages

["Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)" <mtk.manpages-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org>]

Hello Stéphane,

On 03/07/2015 03:57 PM, Stéphane Aulery wrote:
> Hello Michael,
> 
> Bug reports about the missing pages are frequent but unnecessary. The web page
> "missing_pages.html" of the site is very clear about this but unfortunately
> "invisible" to end users.
> 
> What do you think about to add a "undocumented" page for each section (as
> undocumented.3) and create each missing pages with a reference to the
> appropriate "undocumented" page. Thus we can also encourage users to become
> contributors and avoid unnecessary reports.

My problem with this idea is that my simple test when wondering if
a man page exists for an API is to look in the appropriate man?/ 
directory for a file with the right name. With the scheme above, I then
need to look inside the file to see if it is a link to undocumented.x.
That would be a small inconvenience.

Yes, the reports about missing pages are a minor irritation, but I'm
a little doubtful that such an "undocumented" page would encourage much
contribution. (I could be wrong, that's just my guess.)

Cheers,

Michael

-- 
Michael Kerrisk
Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-man" in
the body of a message to majordomo-u79uwXL29TY76Z2rM5mHXA@public.gmane.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html