missing man pages

[Polytropon]

On Sun, 27 Apr 2014 14:37:38 -0700, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:
> 
> I just now noticed a few processes running (via ps -ax) that don't
> appear to have associated man pages:
> 
> gconfd-2
> polkitd
> console-kit-daemon
> hald-addon-mouse-sysmouse:
> hald-runner

Those are "desktop related" and mainly come from "Linux land",
so don't expect documentation be present in manpages named after
the binary.

Regarding HAL, see "man hal". Also check if there's local
documentation installed in /usr/local/share/doc or maybe
in a different directory beneath /usr/local, depending on
the port.



> Does anyone other than me think that this is something that should be
> rectified?

No. Because nobody needs documentation these days. :-)

Honestly: The attitude towards documentation is quite different
in "Linux land" (where many applications, ported to FreeBSD,
initially come from). You'll find documentation somewhere,
that's not the point, but it might be outdated, incorrect,
scattered across the web, in web forums, user pages, wikis,
somewhere in your local file system, or via --help et al.
command line options.

In comparison, FreeBSD is a dreamland for developers: There's
a manpage for virtually everything: System binaries, file
formats, kernel interfaces, library functions, device drivers,
maintenance procedures - all accessible locally.



> Note that there does appear to exist a man page elsewhere for at least
> one of the above:
> 
>    http://www.freedesktop.org/software/polkit/docs/latest/polkitd.8.html
> 
> I have no idea why that didn't get installed on my FreeBSD (9.1) system.

I have a "man 8 polkitd" on my FreeBSD 8 home system, so
at least it has been present. Maybe it has "moved to the
project's wiki"?

(Some similarly sad thing has happened to the excellent
documentation of TSK which is not available locally anymore,
just a "friendly pointer" to a web resource remains...)



> Should I file PRs on these things?

Probably yes. See if there is someone among the maintainers
who is interested in making manpages available.



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...