Some time ago, there was a big discussion on the Debian mailing lists about the preferred documentation format in Debian. The discussion showed clearly that people have very different opinions on that topic and thus, we'll have to implement a flexible solution.

The doc-base package tries to implement such a flexible solution: every Debian package that provides online documentation (other than manual pages) will register these documents to doc-base via the install-docs script (see Section 2.4, “Registering Documents With doc-base”) at installation time and de-register the manuals again when the package is removed.

Since all manuals will eventually be registered, doc-base can also be used to solve another outstanding problem: Debian currently has four different online documentation systems, doc-central, dwww, dochelp, and dhelp. Each system has advantages and disadvantages; thus doc-base supports all of them. The system administrator can choose which implementation he/she prefers.