(debian-policy.info)Manual pages

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12.1 Manual pages
=================

You should install manual pages in ‘nroff’ source form, in appropriate
places under ‘/usr/share/man’.  You should only use sections 1 to 9 (see
the FHS for more details).  You must not install a pre-formatted “cat
page”.

Each program, utility, and function should have an associated manual
page included in the same package.  It is suggested that all
configuration files also have a manual page included as well.  Manual
pages for protocols and other auxiliary things are optional.

If no manual page is available, this is considered as a bug and should
be reported to the Debian Bug Tracking System (the maintainer of the
package is allowed to write this bug report themselves, if they so
desire).  Do not close the bug report until a proper man page is
available.  (1)

You may forward a complaint about a missing man page to the upstream
authors, and mark the bug as forwarded in the Debian bug tracking
system.  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.

Manual pages should be installed compressed using ‘gzip -9’.

If one man page needs to be accessible via several names it is better to
use a symbolic link than the ‘.so’ feature, but there is no need to
fiddle with the relevant parts of the upstream source to change from
‘.so’ to symlinks: don’t do it unless it’s easy.  You should not create
hard links in the manual page directories, nor put absolute filenames in
‘.so’ directives.  The filename in a ‘.so’ in a man page should be
relative to the base of the man page tree (usually ‘/usr/share/man’).
If you do not create any links (whether symlinks, hard links, or ‘.so’
directives) in the file system to the alternate names of the man page,
then you should not rely on ‘man’ finding your man page under those
names based solely on the information in the man page’s header.  (2)

Manual pages in locale-specific subdirectories of ‘/usr/share/man’
should use either UTF-8 or the usual legacy encoding for that language
(normally the one corresponding to the shortest relevant locale name in
‘/usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED’).  For example, pages under
‘/usr/share/man/fr’ should use either UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1.  (3)

A country name (the ‘DE’ in ‘de_DE’) should not be included in the
subdirectory name unless it indicates a significant difference in the
language, as this excludes speakers of the language in other countries.
(4)

If a localized version of a manual page is provided, it should either be
up-to-date or it should be obvious to the reader that it is outdated and
the original manual page should be used instead.  This can be done
either by a note at the beginning of the manual page or by showing the
missing or changed portions in the original language instead of the
target language.

   ---------- Footnotes ----------

   (1) It is not very hard to write a man page.  See the Man-Page-HOWTO
(http://www.schweikhardt.net/man_page_howto.html), man(7), the examples
created by ‘dh_make’, the helper program ‘help2man’, or the directory
‘/usr/share/doc/man-db/examples’.

   (2) Supporting this in ‘man’ often requires unreasonable processing
time to find a manual page or to report that none exists, and moves
knowledge into man’s database that would be better left in the file
system.  This support is therefore deprecated and will cease to be
present in the future.

   (3) ‘man’ will automatically detect whether UTF-8 is in use.  In
future, all manual pages will be required to use UTF-8.

   (4) At the time of writing, Chinese and Portuguese are the main
languages with such differences, so ‘pt_BR’, ‘zh_CN’, and ‘zh_TW’ are
all allowed.