missing man pages

[illoai at gmail.com]

On 27 April 2014 17:37, Ronald F. Guilmette <rfg at tristatelogic.com> 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
>
>
> Does anyone other than me think that this is something that should be
> rectified?
>
> 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.
>

It's up to a maddening combination of third-party developers
(who may be prejudiced against useful tools like man(1)) and
port maintainers (who may be confused, uncaring, jaded, or
wrong) to provide the man pages for third-party applications.

It used to be that debian did man pages for a lot of things that
(misguided) linux kids didn't want to document well (info(1) is
such a lame attempt, guys.  Stop already), but you'd have to
count on the maintainer to pull those in.

For stuff from the ports tree, I'd suggest a polite question to
the maintainer before you fire off a PR: there may be good
reasons they don't come with decent documentation.

You can also do the tedious:
% pkg which /path/to/offending file
% pkg info -R resulting_pkg_name | grep /usr/local/man

or some equivalent nonsense.  Maybe it will give you
something, but don't count on it.

Fr'instance, the obnoxious devel/dbus installs no man pages,
so you have to guess at its true purpose.  Maybe it makes hot-
dogs, maybe it just e-mails the NSA when you utter profanities,
maybe it does something else.  Good luck!

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