Re: man missing ?
At 11:07 AM 1/26/1999 -0500, MallarJ@aol.com wrote:
>In a message dated 1/26/99 9:55:07 AM Central Standard Time,
>paul@experimental.braille.uwo.ca writes:
>
>> hello, very simple. Man-db is not necessary to run linux. it is nice to
>> have but if you don't have man linux can still run. the other reason why
>> man is not included in the base distribution is the space issue.
>>
>
>I see that point, but....
>
>* How big is it, really, especially tarred and gzipped. I can't imagine one
>more boot disk is that big of an issue. If it's more than one disk, maybe a
>subset of the manpages is warranted that CAN be included.
>
>* Being that man is the basic help system of Linux, it's too important to NOT
>include in the boot disks. ESPECIALLY for new users.
>
>* Man may not be required, but everyone on this list constantly points to man
>pages. The reference manuals constantly point to man pages. It's totally
>frustrating to be told to read the man pages, but you don't have them, and
>can't figure out how to get them because you don't have the man pages.
>
>Jay
But is it necessary for the boot disks? At this stage of the installation
you don't have a lot more functionality which is usable than you did after
booting from the rescue disk.
The purpose of base is to get enough of a system installed and working so
that the user can run dselect and perform the installation of additional
packages (from a hard disk, mass quantities of floppies, cdrom or a
network connection, including nfs and ppp.)
This is the appropriate time to install man-db (the man page for dselect
isn't particularly helpful anyway.)
Bob
----
Bob Nielsen Internet: nielsen@primenet.com
Tucson, AZ AMPRnet: w6swe@w6swe.ampr.org
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