Bug#511522: general: Man pages should say what package a program belongs to
* Jack Grahl [Sun, 11 Jan 2009 19:56:52 +0000]:
> Package: general
> Severity: wishlist
Hello, Jack.
> If some program belongs to a package which does not have the same name
> as the program, the man page for that command should say which package
> the program is part of.
> This is not the case in, for instance, coreutils or util-linux.
> This information is needed, even for packages that are always installed
> as part of the base distribution, since to get source code for a program
> in coreutils one needs to know that it is part of that package.
I understand what you're asking, but I don't think modifying every man
page in Debian to say what package the binary comes from is a good idea.
In particular, man pages come from upstream, and we'd be carrying an
unnecessary diff in *every* package. (Except, heh, for those binaries
without a man page).
I'm closing this bug, because there *is* a standard and more scalable
way in Debian to achieve what you want: dpkg -S. You can run that
command to know what package a binary (or, in general, any file) belongs
to. For example:
% dpkg -S /bin/ls
coreutils: /bin/ls
Hope this helps.
--
Adeodato Simó dato at net.com.org.es
Debian Developer adeodato at debian.org
— Oh, George, you didn't jump into the river. How sensible of you!
-- Mrs Banks in “Mary Poppins”
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