Bug#511522: general: Man pages should say what package a program belongs to

[Adeodato Simó <dato@net.com.org.es>]

* 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”