info libc

[Miguel Obliviemo <miggle@calypso.view.net.au>]

Dear list,

I'm new to Debian.  I downloaded the first Lenny DVD and booted it and
installed it.  I'm staggered that there can be _five_ DVDs.  That's
quite a lot.

In installing, I chose the "desktop" complexion because I wanted to
have a working graphical user interface.  Maybe that was a mistake.

What I notice is that /usr/share/info is sparse, and /usr/share/doc is
full, but full of trash.

On the second point, not many people will want to read 1020 changelogs
and 1020 READMEs.  What is in /usr/share/doc is an immense wealth of
small oddments from source distributions, three or four from each,
that nobody knew what to do with.  Someone might be interested in a
couple of them.  Well, they are in the source, unchanged.  Anyone who is
interested knows where to get them.

I question whether this is what a Unix /usr/doc is all about.  It is
not documentation in any useful sense.

In effect it is just a directory of directory names, giving a list of
the names of all packages installed.  Such a list could be provided by
just touching the names.

In /usr/share there is the same immense number of the same directory
names.  Everything in /usr/share/doc/yelp could be with the other
stuff in /usr/share/yelp.

I suggest that /usr/share/doc should just contain symbolic links to
the actual documentation directories, /usr/share/man, /usr/share/info
and something pointing to a deposit of html documentation. (I suppose
there is such, but I don't know where it is.)  So people looking for
documentation would know where to go.

And 99% of what is in /usr/share should be in, say,
/usr/share/packages, so that what is of general significance in
/usr/share, anything that is not package-specific, such as dict, info,
locale, becomes more visible.

There is more there, apparently, such as installation-report, but
you'd never know, they are just a few needles in the haystack.

Back to question one.

It's the main reason for this message.

There is no libc.info.  Can someone please tell me how can I get it?

aptitude search glibc shows:

v   glibc-2.7-1                     -
i   glibc-doc                       - GNU C Library: Documentation
v   glibc-pic                       -
p   glibc-source                    - GNU C Library: sources

As you can see, I installed glibc-doc.  In the hope of getting the
info files.  I don't know how to find out what that installation
actually did.  But as far as I can see it did nothing useful, and
/usr/share/info is still just about empty.  Do I have to download the
source to get the useful doc, while Debian installs stuff of no use to
users as the doc?

--
Miguel