man page missing

[ole-tange]

$ man reuse
No manual entry for reuse

[mxmehl]

Ideally this would be generated automatically from the existing docu in some sort.

[stephanlachnit]

help2man reuse --no-info > reuse.1 is probably enough here and easy to implement. And it can be done at build time.

Note: For reproducibility, you might need to set SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH (see https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=787444), but reproducible build servers should do that automatically.

[ole-tange]

To me just converting the help text would not be enough: The man page should contain all information that is needed to run this version, and not just refer to online documentation.

There are several problems with online documentation:

• They often only refer to the newest version and not the version you have installed.
• They do not work if the hosting provider no longer wants to host them (you will be surprised how common this is after just 10 years).

But I agree with @mxmehl that it ought to be possible to generate it from the existing documentation.

[stephanlachnit]

A full documentation should be installed sperately, at least that's what Debian does everywhere. Man pages usually for cli programs, offline html for full docs.

[stephanlachnit]

Maybe useful: https://pypi.org/project/click-man/

[jonasstein]

We generate man from .rst and included a git workflow and makefiles https://github.com/scsitape/stenc and it works very well. Perhaps you can reuse some ideas here.