Re: [Bug-tar] tar man page

[Sergey Poznyakoff]

Hi Karl,

> We just received a report on webmasters that some man page for tar
> refers to the wrong url http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/man.

The errors like that are reported every now and then. There are lots of
`man' pages for GNU tar written by package maintainers or distributors.
 
> It seems that the tar distribution doesn't include a man page.

There is no man page. The only and authoritative source of
documentation is tar.texi and documents profuced from it.

> If that's right, it seems it would still be useful (although I know it's
> not strictly necessary for GNU), to avoid errors like this.  You can
> generate with help2man

I believe this as an extra maintenance burden. The man page generated by
help2man is useless, it says the same thing everybody will get
by simply running `tar --help'.

> to avoid having an independent source to keep updated.

If it is their choice to provide it, then let them provide it. Some of man
pages I saw (those distributed with Slackware, for example)
contain much more info than help2man would produce, and we'd do their
users a very doubtful favor if we replace a third party man page saying
something with our page saying nothing useful at all.

Regards,
Sergey