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Chapter 12

Documentation

12.1 Manual pages

You should install manual pages in

nroff

source form, in appropriate places under

/usr

/share/man

. You should only use sections 1 to 9 (see the FHS for more details). You must not

install a pre formatted  cat page .

Each program, utility, and function should have an associated manual page included in the

same package. It is suggested that all configuration files also have a manual page included as

well. Manual pages for protocols and other auxiliary things are optional.

If no manual page is available, this is considered as a bug and should be reported to the De 

bian Bug Tracking System (the maintainer of the package is allowed to write this bug report

themselves, if they so desire). Do not close the bug report until a proper man page is available.

1

You may forward a complaint about a missing man page to the upstream authors, and mark

the bug as forwarded in the Debian bug tracking system. Even though the GNU Project do not

in general consider the lack of a man page to be a bug, we do; if they tell you that they don't

consider it a bug you should leave the bug in our bug tracking system open anyway.

Manual pages should be installed compressed using

gzip  9

.

If one man page needs to be accessible via several names it is better to use a symbolic link than

the

.so

feature, but there is no need to fiddle with the relevant parts of the upstream source

to change from

.so

to symlinks: don't do it unless it's easy. You should not create hard links

in the manual page directories, nor put absolute filenames in

.so

directives. The filename in

a

.so

in a man page should be relative to the base of the man page tree (usually

/usr/share

/man

). If you do not create any links (whether symlinks, hard links, or

.so

directives) in the

file system to the alternate names of the man page, then you should not rely on

man

finding

your man page under those names based solely on the information in the man page's header.

2

1

It is not very hard to write a man page. See the Man Page HOWTO (

http://www.schweikhardt.

net/man_page_howto.html

),

man(7)

, the examples created by

debmake

or

dh_make

, the helper programs

help2man

, or the directory

/usr/share/doc/man db/examples

.

2

Supporting this in

man

often requires unreasonable processing time to find a manual page or to report that