Subject: Re: bug#47324: Missing information in documentation

From: "Glenn Golden" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2021 09:36:48 -0600

On Thu, Mar 25, 2021, at 07:49, L A Walsh wrote:
> On 2021/03/22 15:21, Bernhard Voelker wrote:
> >
> > According to the GNU guidelines and to avoid double work, the man page of
> > the coreutils is essentially not much more than the output of --help.
> >   
> ---
>     It sure would be nice if GNU would join the *nix family and
> put full documentation in the manpage (as well as or in place of
> putting it in 'info').
> 
>     If languages such as python and perl can document their usage
> in manpages, certainly gnu could be as helpful.
> 
> 

Perl is by no means fully documented via its man pages. And
the top-level man page (perl.1perl) has made that explicit up front
for many years. The present language (perl.1perl, from 5.32.1) is:

   "Some documentation is not available as man pages, so if a cross-
    reference is not found by man, try it with perldoc."

Perl's perldoc(1) is more or less analogous in spirit to GNU's
approach based on info(1). The man pages contain quite a bit of
useful info, but do not purport to be exhaustive.