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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.[99]
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.[100]
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.[101]
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.[102]
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.
Info documents should be installed in /usr/share/info
. They
should be compressed with gzip -9.
The install-info
program maintains a directory of installed info
documents in /usr/share/info/dir
for the use of info readers.[103] This file must not be included
in packages. Packages containing info documents should depend on dpkg
(>= 1.15.4) | install-info to ensure that the directory file is
properly rebuilt during partial upgrades from Debian 5.0 (lenny) and earlier.
Info documents should contain section and directory entry information in the
document for the use of install-info
. The section should be
specified via a line starting with INFO-DIR-SECTION followed by a
space and the section of this info page. The directory entry or entries should
be included between a START-INFO-DIR-ENTRY line and an
END-INFO-DIR-ENTRY line. For example:
INFO-DIR-SECTION Individual utilities START-INFO-DIR-ENTRY * example: (example). An example info directory entry. END-INFO-DIR-ENTRY
To determine which section to use, you should look at
/usr/share/info/dir
on your system and choose the most relevant
(or create a new section if none of the current sections are relevant).[104]
Any additional documentation that comes with the package may be installed at
the discretion of the package maintainer. Plain text documentation should be
installed in the directory /usr/share/doc/package
,
where package is the name of the package, and compressed with
gzip -9 unless it is small.
If a package comes with large amounts of documentation which many users of the package will not require you should create a separate binary package to contain it, so that it does not take up disk space on the machines of users who do not need or want it installed.
It is often a good idea to put text information files (README
s,
changelogs, and so forth) that come with the source package in
/usr/share/doc/package
in the binary package. However,
you don't need to install the instructions for building and installing the
package, of course!
Packages must not require the existence of any files in
/usr/share/doc/
in order to function [105]. Any files that are
referenced by programs but are also useful as stand alone documentation should
be installed under /usr/share/package/
with symbolic
links from /usr/share/doc/package
.
/usr/share/doc/package
may be a symbolic link to
another directory in /usr/share/doc
only if the two packages both
come from the same source and the first package Depends on the second.[106]
Former Debian releases placed all additional documentation in
/usr/doc/package
. This has been changed to
/usr/share/doc/package
, and packages must not put
documentation in the directory /usr/doc/package
. [107]
The unification of Debian documentation is being carried out via HTML.
If your package comes with extensive documentation in a markup format that can
be converted to various other formats you should if possible ship HTML versions
in a binary package, in the directory
/usr/share/doc/appropriate-package
or its
subdirectories.[108]
Other formats such as PostScript may be provided at the package maintainer's discretion.
Every package must be accompanied by a verbatim copy of its copyright
information and distribution license in the file
/usr/share/doc/package/copyright
. This file must
neither be compressed nor be a symbolic link.
In addition, the copyright file must say where the upstream sources (if any) were obtained. It should name the original authors of the package and the Debian maintainer(s) who were involved with its creation.
Packages in the contrib or non-free archive areas should state in the copyright file that the package is not part of the Debian distribution and briefly explain why.
A copy of the file which will be installed in
/usr/share/doc/package/copyright
should be in
debian/copyright
in the source package.
/usr/share/doc/package
may be a symbolic link to
another directory in /usr/share/doc
only if the two packages both
come from the same source and the first package Depends on the second. These
rules are important because copyrights must be extractable by mechanical means.
Packages distributed under the Apache license (version 2.0), the Artistic
license, the GNU GPL (versions 1, 2, or 3), the GNU LGPL (versions 2, 2.1, or
3), and the GNU FDL (versions 1.2 or 1.3) should refer to the corresponding
files under /usr/share/common-licenses
,[109] rather than quoting them in
the copyright file.
You should not use the copyright file as a general README
file.
If your package has such a file it should be installed in
/usr/share/doc/package/README
or
README.Debian
or some other appropriate place.
Any examples (configurations, source files, whatever), should be installed in a
directory /usr/share/doc/package/examples
. These files
should not be referenced by any program: they're there for the benefit of the
system administrator and users as documentation only. Architecture-specific
example files should be installed in a directory
/usr/lib/package/examples
with symbolic links to them
from /usr/share/doc/package/examples
, or the latter
directory itself may be a symbolic link to the former.
If the purpose of a package is to provide examples, then the example files may
be installed into /usr/share/doc/package
.
Packages that are not Debian-native must contain a compressed copy of the
debian/changelog
file from the Debian source tree in
/usr/share/doc/package
with the name
changelog.Debian.gz
.
If an upstream changelog is available, it should be accessible as
/usr/share/doc/package/changelog.gz
in plain text. If
the upstream changelog is distributed in HTML, it should be made available in
that form as /usr/share/doc/package/changelog.html.gz
and a plain text changelog.gz
should be generated from it using,
for example, lynx -dump -nolist. If the upstream changelog files
do not already conform to this naming convention, then this may be achieved
either by renaming the files, or by adding a symbolic link, at the maintainer's
discretion.[110]
All of these files should be installed compressed using gzip -9, as they will become large with time even if they start out small.
If the package has only one changelog which is used both as the Debian
changelog and the upstream one because there is no separate upstream maintainer
then that changelog should usually be installed as
/usr/share/doc/package/changelog.gz
; if there is a
separate upstream maintainer, but no upstream changelog, then the Debian
changelog should still be called changelog.Debian.gz
.
For details about the format and contents of the Debian changelog file, please
see Debian changelog:
debian/changelog
, Section 4.4.
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Debian Policy Manual
version 3.9.2.0, 2011-05-01