From Fedora Project Wiki

I'm man-pages and man package maintainer and I want to start to somehow add some rules to man-pages to package guildelines (they are the most common documentation so it could be nice to have some rules for them too).

  • At first I want to find out the number of binaries from directories /bin, /sbin, /usr/sbin and /usr/bin which have no man-page.

From this numbers there could be generated some recommendations like: all binaries in ... directories should have man page.

Statistic about man-pages (generated from fc12 installation DVD content - 2400 rpms ) :

directory number of missing man-pages number of binaries/scripts percentage of missing man pages
/bin 12 110 11%
/sbin 50 326 15%
/usr/sbin 125 431 29%
/usr/bin 1270 2814 45%

Statistic about man-pages (generated from fc11 installation DVD content - 2252 rpms ) :

directory number of missing man-pages number of binaries/scripts percentage of missing man pages
/bin 14 108 13%
/sbin 55 324 17%
/usr/sbin 141 447 32%
/usr/bin 1326 3149 42%
  • for me /bin and /sbin are good candidates for directories in which the binaries and scripts should have man page.


  • there could be done some other activities - add test for missing man-pages to rpmlint, add there some tool which will check options man-page declare and options which the tool accept or some spellchecker. There could be also do a test which check whether the man-pages are in good path.

Links: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MAN_pages_which_exists_in_other_places(draft)