Re: BE MORE SIMPLE!!!!

[Kirk Hogenson <Kirk.Hogenson@wingra.com>]

Eric Gillespie, Jr. wrote:
> For example, someone asked if there was a package
> containing the Howtos. Instead of telling him the name of the package, 
> he should have been told how to grep the Contents file, that way he 
> can find things on his own instead of asking the list every time. 
> Remember, catch a man a fish and you feed him that day, teach the man 
> to fish, and he'll never starve again.

Kristopher Johnson wrote:
> I'm the guy that asked which package had the HOWTOs.  I know it seemed 
> like a dumb question, but I did try searching on "HOWTO" in both 
> dselect and on the Debian web site, and came up with nothing.  And I 
> started paging through the 2700+ packages shown in dselect, but gave 
> up after an hour or so of that.  

I don't want to speak for Eric, but I really doubt he was saying
that you were asking a dumb question.  I think he was instead 
criticising those who answered by just telling you which package you 
needed, rather than telling you how you find this information out
for yourself.

That way, the next time you have a question of the form "I need to
find out which package has <something>", you won't need to ask again.
Even more than that, you perhaps might see someone else ask a
question like that, and pass the information on.

Please don't feel bad for asking "dumb" questions! (Though I really
think you were asking a good question, but even if it were a dumb
question you should not feel bad for asking it.)  That is what
debian-user is for.

Anyway, let me describe what Eric was talking about.  The file 
/var/lib/dpkg/Contents-i386.gz contains information about which
package contains what.  If you want to find the HOWTO's, for
example, try something like:

  zgrep HOWTO /var/lib/dpkg/Contents-i386.gz | less

This searches through the Contents file and prints all of the lines
that contain the word HOWTO.

As another example: suppose you are compiling something and you get
the error:  "sgml2html: command not found".  This happened to me
last night.  I tried:

  zgrep sgml2html /var/lib/dpkg/Contents-i386.gz | less

and it printed:

usr/bin/sgml2html                         text/sgml-tools
usr/man/man1/sgml2html.1.gz               text/sgml-tools

So, I knew that I need to install the package "sgml-tools", which
is in the "text" section.

I hope this helps, and good luck getting your sound card working.
And please ask here if you run into problems.  You are immune to
"What a dumb question" attacks if you've read the Howto. :)

Kirk