[GRLUG] Suse

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> Does Ubuntu require man pages for its packages?  Debian does.  In fact,
> the Debian developers write many of the man pages for the utilities/apps
> for which the upstream does not provide them.  Does any other distro do
> that?  (This is not intended to become a distro-flame-fest.)

I think this distro-centric way of looking at development is just
incorrect.  Distributions are not the centers of Open Source
development, they are merely a packaging (and possibly testing) layer.
Which is what makes HOWTO-X-On-Debian/SUSE/RedHat/ etc... such a waste
of people's effort.  Other than the trivial step of how you install the
packages setting up XYZ on any of the mainstream distributions is the
same process.  When documentation is maintained numerous places it
becomes impossible to maintain;  if you want Samba docs, go to the Samba
project, if you want Apache docs, go the Apache project, etc...
everything else is almost out-of-date the minute it hits the disk.  If
documentation for XYZ needs improvement/fixing, get in contact with the
project, and fix the upstream docs;  I'm not aware of any
remotely-mainstream project that is going to turn away documentation
updates or volunteers.  The last thing the world needs is another
unmaintained HOWTO/INTRO/etc... clogging up their google searches.  My
only point was is that Ubuntu is probably the single largest
contributor [at this point] to the documentation miasma .

> Having the
> command work the same way on all *nix systems  and having a man page
> available with all its options is another story.