Bugzilla – Bug 1213496
Man pages and documentation in general missing
Last modified: 2024-05-21 08:27:35 UTC
In Aeon the system is immutable and shouldn't be touched. However, there are no man pages installed. This is not really user-friendly. But maybe it's on purpose to make sure people don't touch their base install? But even after doing `distrobox enter` and you download and enter the default distrobox, which is `registry.opensuse.org/opensuse/distrobox:latest`, I still don't get manual pages. This makes using the system harder than it should be. What's the reasoning to not include documentation? On production non-interactive containers I get why man pages are a waste of disk space. But distrobox is meant to be used as a normal user environment. In such an environment people expect to find man pages. Otherwise the system is in the way of getting things done. In contrast, Fedora Silverblue has the man pages installed in the base OS, but also in their default toolbox image. Which to me makes perfect sense. Humans are going to use those environment interactively. Googling/Ducking for man pages online would be weird and the `--help` output isn't always complete or fully helpful. Can man pages be included in Aeon and in the toolbox containers?
Hello, Thanks for your bug report - the Aeon Project has a new rule Any bug report, forum post, or telegram message that includes any direct comparison with Fedora Silverblue to help justify the request immediately gets a lower priority. This bug will be handled accordingly
Bug confirmed
(In reply to Richard Brown from comment #2) > Bug confirmed So, considering this is filed as a distrobox bug: 1) the manpages of distrobox _on_the_host_ are stripped out by Aeon itself which, AFAIUI, does that for all the packages. If we don't want to stop doing that for the entire base system, fine. If not, I don't think there's a way for a particular package to override the setting and force the installation of its docs... Or is there one and I just don't know it? 2) for our distrobox container, I think this is solved? At least, I seem to have manpages in mine...
> 2) for our distrobox container, I think this is solved? At least, I seem to have manpages in mine... That has been improved by now, man pages are now indeed included in distrobox. However, this does mean you have to install the same software in your container to get the man pages you're missing on your OS itself. Then I wonder, what exactly is solved with this approach? Are man pages excluded to save disk space? But if you want man pages (I suppose any interactive system does need them) then you have to jump through extra hoops to get those man pages, and add extra disk overhead since the container comes with more than just man pages. To me it seems strange to exclude man pages on the OS itself. On MicroOS I can sort of understand it, although man pages are still useful since `--help` doesn't always cut it. But since this report is about Aeon, an interactive OS with a GUI, I think it would be more user friendly to have those man pages included by default. The reason the man pages are missing is because of this: ``` grep excludedocs /etc/zypp/zypp.conf ``` On the OS itself it outputs: rpm.install.excludedocs=yes And in the distrobox it outputs to 'no'.
(In reply to UPPERCASE from comment #5) > That has been improved by now, man pages are now indeed included in > distrobox. > Right, so, the component of this bug should be set to something else, I think. > However, this does mean you have to install the same software in > your container to get the man pages you're missing on your OS itself. Then I > wonder, what exactly is solved with this approach? Are man pages excluded to > save disk space? But if you want man pages (I suppose any interactive system > does need them) then you have to jump through extra hoops to get those man > pages, and add extra disk overhead since the container comes with more than > just man pages. To me it seems strange to exclude man pages on the OS > itself. On MicroOS I can sort of understand it, although man pages are still > useful since `--help` doesn't always cut it. But since this report is about > Aeon, an interactive OS with a GUI, I think it would be more user friendly > to have those man pages included by default. > Well, if you want to discuss the fact that the host strips out the manpages (and, yes, I know how that it does that and how it's done), that's fine by me. All I'm saying is that this is no (longer) a distrobox bug... That's all I'm saying. And, therefore, I'm changing the component to Base.
Fixed in new-style Aeon install images
I think the confusion on my part is that as a normal user the alias `man=man-online` is not set when opening the GNOME terminal in the Aeon GNOME shell. I only discover this now. When I SSH'ed into my Aeon virtual machine I do get this alias. Maybe it has to do with the logic in `/usr/etc/profile.d/man-online.sh`? Because as far as I see, that's the profile that loads the alias. When I open a terminal in the GUI on Aeon and run `alias` I see: localhost:~> alias | grep man alias unmount='echo "Error: Try the command: umount" 1>&2; false' When I do the same, but then through an SSH session, I see: localhost:~> alias | grep man alias man='man-online' alias unmount='echo "Error: Try the command: umount" 1>&2; false' Because I used Aeon from a GUI terminal in my VM, I never got to see the man-online solution to load man pages from the Internet. So not sure if the bug I reported here is the right one. It may be just a Bash environment issue.