Install manual pages when the choice is made to do so.

[sj]

we don't ship man pages atm. we can make 'man' and 'info' aliases that tell people just discovering their terminal exactly what command to run to install them.

[gnu]

Ubuntu has a great hook in the bash "no such command" processor that looks up the command in the deb database and tells you what "apt-get install" command to run to get the command you tried to run.

(We could switch from RPM's to debs, then this would work out of the box. :-)

[bernie]

Replying to gnu:

Ubuntu has a great hook in the bash "no such command" processor that looks up the command in the deb database and tells you what "apt-get install" command to run to get the command you tried to run.

Yeah, I was very impressed... extremely useful for novices!

(We could switch from RPM's to debs, then this would work out of the box. :-)

I also thought that feature depended on the dpkg database, but it does not:

http://packages.ubuntu.com/feisty/admin/command-not-found-data

apt-cache is much faster than yum, but still not fast enough to suggest packages on the fly :-)

[dking]

Replying to sj:

we don't ship man pages atm. we can make 'man' and 'info' aliases that tell people just discovering their terminal exactly what command to run to install them.

This is a bigger problem than you think.

1. Multiple packages available by YUM refuse to install the correct manual page expected. You cant even do a "man ls" and have it work.

2. Multiple packages in YUM created expressly to get this man page data installed locally are empty and installing them gives empty directories. This includes the "man" "Man-pages" and other development packages that should include the man pages for things like API calls (Like "man printf"), so basically installing these packages is a no-op that takes up space on the XO.

3. We still allow people to install the man page tools and man-pages packages; We need to allow the children to have the option to choose what they decide to put on the XO.

[dking]

I messed up and changed the Milestone; putting it back.

[dking]

I have verified this. Changing bug to verified as a result.

[bernie]

Replying to dking:

Replying to sj:

1. Multiple packages available by YUM refuse to install the correct manual page expected. You cant even do a "man ls" and have it work. 2. Multiple packages in YUM created expressly to get this man page data installed locally are empty and installing them gives empty directories. This includes the "man" "Man-pages" and other development packages that should include the man pages for things like API calls (Like "man printf"), so basically installing these packages is a no-op that takes up space on the XO.

This is due to "%_excludedocs 1" in /etc/rpm/macros.pilgrim.

3. We still allow people to install the man page tools and man-pages packages; We need to allow the children to have the option to choose what they decide to put on the XO.

A UI to toggle man pages seems overkill. We could just document the %_excludedocs hack in the wiki for now.

[Quozl]

Workaround on an XO in recent builds:

• delete the %_excludedocs line in /etc/rpm/macros.imgcreate
• be connected to the internet
• install the manual page viewer with yum install man
• identify the packages you require a manual page for, e.g. rpm -qf /bin/ls responds with coreutils,
• reinstall the packages, e.g. yum reinstall coreutils

[sj]

Copying from duplicate #5640:

We don't ship man pages.

Not even the packages designed to include them have any.

This makes an manual pages package or tool a no-op that takes up space on the XO if they are installed.

We should let people make the choice to have the manual pages so that they can self educate if they choose, but not make it a requirement.