Packages usually provide documentation that is only useful while building the package, or documentation that can be read before any build is taken (usually, plain text files). This documentation includes generally some notes regarding to system requirements (the README file), an introduction to the program, the license (the COPYING file), the list of authors and contributors (the PEOPLE file), etc.

Buildtool provides an easy and consistant method across packages to access this kind of documentation. It is usually placed in the top directory of the source tree, but this may vary. Buildtool hides these details. The documentation is read using the bt_doc module, a small interactive documentation reader. It shows a list of available documents together with a comment about their content.

The bt_doc module does not allow any argument. It must be run from the top level directory of a buildtoolized package. As an example:

$ buildtool doc