From: "Joseph S. Myers"<joseph@codesourcery.com>
Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2012 23:18:53 +0000 (UTC)
In accordance with the GNU Coding Standards, man pages are secondary
to the Texinfo documentation for GNU software. They should be read
as independent observations about the library rather than a contract
with applications.
Unfortunately this line of thinking ignores reality. I really am
getting frustrated with these repeated divisive statements about
the manual pages vs glibc.
If the glibc documentation were complete and widely used, you could
say that the man-pages are secondary.
But the glibc documentation is far from complete and is not widely
used, and therefore the man-pages are not secondary.
The man pages are the de-facto documentation for the application
programming interfaces provided by glibc. They are the primary and
only complete source. No coding standards document, GNU or otherwise,
can change this fact.
I would like to see a deeper acceptance and acknowledgment of this
reality, rather than the continued usage of scarecrows such as the GNU
Conding Standards to pretend that the actual situation is different or
should not be acknowledged.