Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 7018
system-level daemons should have TFM
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:52 EDT
I've noticed that many of the system-level building blocks that RedHat uses are starting to ship without manpages. Ok, I can see gnomehelp or info pages for userland programs and GUI-related things, but IMnsHO there's no excuse for shipping system binaries without manpages. While I've seen this occur with other programs, my beef today is particularly with "ppp-watch" which seems to be new to rh6.1 -- would it be too difficult to explain *somewhere* what this program does, what arguments can be passed to it, what its exit values are, etc? While I *can* go find the source and figure it out for myself, that's a little difficult when I'm trying to figure out where the interface configuration is bombing... IOW, I'd be happy to RTFM if there *was* a FM. If indeed there is one, I will happily apologize, swallow my irritation, and publicly flog myself in return for a pointer to it.
It is not documented because it is not intended to be called directly. Perhaps it should be in /lib/initscripts/ or something like that... It is intended to be called ONLY via ifup-ppp and not other use is encouraged.
The fact that RedHat doesn't intend for ppp-watch to be called directly doesn't mean that end-users won't need information on it in order to debug problems in the field. Hell, getty is supposed to be invoked only by init, and there's three different getty-related manpages... Let me highlight my underlying complaint here: system binaries should be documented. In particular, system binaries without which critical functionality (such as remote or network connectivity) is lost *must* be documented in order for the open-source development model to remain viable. (How can I tell whether it's a bug if I don't have information on what the program should be doing? How can I tell which part of the connection process is failing if I don't know what parts are doing what?) So yes, I think that at a minimum there should be information left in /usr/doc/initscripts-%{version}, if not a complete manpage. Two lines in the rpm changelog doesn't cut it.
You are right. I have added ppp-watch.8 for the next release of initscripts.