The point about manual pages has always seemed to me to be one of the points where the system fails us. There are a fair number of manual pages that the world at large would benefit from having in the original softwares, that are instead stuck buried in a patches subdirectory in a Debian git repository, and have been for years.
This is not to say that Debian is the sole example of this. The FreeBSD/NetBSD packages/ports systems have their share of globally useful stuff that is squirrelled away as a local patch. The point is not that Debian is a problem, but that it too systematizes the idea that (specifically) manual pages for external stuff go primarily into an operating system's own source control, instead of that being the last resort.
Usually the Debian manual page author or package maintainer will send that upstream. Same goes for patches. Sometimes upstream doesn't want manual pages, or wants it in a different format, and the Debian person doesn't have time to rewrite it.
There's a belief that this is usual. But having watched the process for a couple of decades, it seems to me that that is just a belief, and actual practice doesn't work that way. A lot of times this stuff just gets stuck and never sent along.
I also think that the idea that original authors must not accept manual pages is a way of explaining how the belief does not match reality, without accepting that it is the belief itself that is wrong. Certainly, the number of times that things work out like the net-tools example elsethread, where clearly the original authors do want manual pages, because they eventually wrote some, and end up duplicating Debian's (and FreeBSD's/NetBSD's) efforts, is evidence that contradicts the belief that there's some widespread no-manual-pages culture amongst developers.
It's also easy for people to have the opinion the those who do the unpaid work of packaging software should do even more work for free.
I have sent about 50 or so patches upstream for the 300 packages I maintain and while it reduces the amount of work long-term it's also surprisingly amount of work.
Typically the Debian patches are licensed under the same license as the original project. So there is nothing stopping anyone who feels that more patches should be sent upstream to send them.
I didn't ask for you to second-guess my software. I didn't ask you to ship modified (potentially broken and/or substantially different in opinionated ways) versions of my software under the same name.
If you're going to do that, then you should actually let people know. Otherwise don't do it. It's not about "but the license allows it", it's about what the right thing to do is.
Debian has given me the most grief of any Linux distro by far. Actually, Debian is the only system I can recall giving me grief. Debian pushes a lot of work to the broader ecosystem to people who never asked for it.
I didn't choose to be associated with Debian, but I have no choice in the matter. You did choose to be associated with the packages you maintain.
So don't give me any of that "but my unpaid time!". Either do the job properly or don't do it at all. Both are fine; no maintainer asked you to package anything. They're just asking you to not indirectly push work on them by shipping random (potentially broken and/or highly opinionated) patches they're never even told about.
> If you're going to do that, then you should actually let people know. Otherwise don't do it. It's not about "but the license allows it", it's about what the right thing to do is.
Okay, I am hereby letting you know: Every single distro patches software. All of them. Debian, Arch, Fedora, Gentoo, NixOS, Alpine, Void, big, small, commercial, hobbyist. All of them.
That's simply not true. Some distros may patch a few build issues, or maybe the rare breaking bug, but nothing like what Debian does. To claim anything else is Trumpian levels of falsehood.
And often it's not an unhelpful upstream, just an upstream that sees little use for man pages in their releases, and doesn't want to spend time maintaining documentation in parallel to what their README.md or --help provides (with which the man page must be kept in sync).
I spent years packaging software (mostly Gnome 2.x) for NetBSD. I almost-always tried to upstream the local patches that were needed either for build fixes or improvements (like flexibility to adapt to non-Linux file system hierarchies or using different APIs).
It was exhausting though, and an uphill battle. Most patches were ignored for months or years, with common “is this still necessary?” or “please update the patch; it doesn’t apply anymore” responses. And it was generally a lot of effort. So patches staying in their distros is… “normal”.
Another issue is that these manpages can become outdated (and/or are downright wrong).
Overall I feel it's one of those Debian policies stuck in 1995. There are other reasonable ways to get documentation these days, and while manpages can be useful for some types of programs, they're less useful for others.
This is not to say that Debian is the sole example of this. The FreeBSD/NetBSD packages/ports systems have their share of globally useful stuff that is squirrelled away as a local patch. The point is not that Debian is a problem, but that it too systematizes the idea that (specifically) manual pages for external stuff go primarily into an operating system's own source control, instead of that being the last resort.