Bug#1084158: closed by Jeremy Bícha <jeremy.bicha at canonical.com> (Re: Bug#1084158: gnome-snapshot: man page for snapshot is missing)

[Jeremy Bícha]

On Sat, Oct 5, 2024 at 6:03 PM Boud Roukema <bouddebbug at cosmo.torun.pl> wrote:
> > gnome-snapshot does not accept any arguments nor does it have any
> > configuration files. Therefore, there is nothing to document with a
> > manpage.
>
> On the contrary, apart from the usual minimal information required in Debian,
> a description of the buttons' meanings and the expected behaviour
> would be useful so that the user doesn't have to guess.
>
> > I am closing this bug since we will not provide a manpage that isn't useful.
>
> You don't have to provide an upstream man page if you don't wish to,
> but the Debian policy is clear:
>
> https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-docs.html#manual-pages
>
> "Do not close the bug report until a proper man page is available."
>
> "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."

I consider Debian Policy to be out of date on that point. If Debian
were mostly a command-line OS, I agree that it's important to
distribute a manpage or at least an info page for as many command as
possible. But manpages are not appropriate to document GUI apps; the
appropriate way to document GUI apps is with in-app help.

I would not close this bug or another bug if it requested in-app help
for Snapshot. But running Snapshot from the command line is not useful
nor would it be useful to provide command-line help (manpages) for
Snapshot.

I haven't tried to update Debian Policy on this point (I have many
things on my todo list), but it is very common for package maintainers
to distribute Lintian overrides for this Debian Policy recommendation.
>From my perspective, I didn't think it was worth the time to create
those Lintian overrides for my packages.

https://codesearch.debian.net/search?q=path%3Adebian+no-manual-page&perpkg=1

Thank you,
Jeremy Bícha