Re: Debian man pages have annoying feature(sic)
On 05/30/2020 05:57 AM, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
On Sat, May 30, 2020 at 04:52:47AM -0500, Richard Owlett wrote:
I the recent thread about returning a Debian installation to its
original state "popularity-contest" was mentioned.
I wished to compare it to other tools mentioned in that thread.
Obvious stating point -- read the man page.
As I never installed its package I went to https://manpages.debian.org/buster/popularity-contest/popularity-contest.8.en.html
.
_Clarification by OP_
I had not installed popularity-contest _for cause_:
a. its phone-home feature violates my security & privacy policy.
b. it would pull in unneeded packages which might interfere with
intentionally installed package(s) to serve similar functions.
It did not explicitly answer my question.
However, under "SEE ALSO" it stated:
Additional documentation is in /usr/share/doc/popularity-contest/.
*PROBLEM*
As package is not installed, that directory does *NOT* exist.
Where to find required documentation on the web?
NOTE BENE
This post is about man pages as a class.
Of course, it would be nice to have everything in the man page.
That is in general difficult, since upstream doesn't always
do it this way -- packaging isn't the place to change that.
That said, it's possible to browse Debian packages sources
in the 'net.
I'll show how to do it based on your concrete example.
First, the structure of a source package doesn't correspond
to the installed binary package; the reference given in the
above "SEE ALSO" is relative to the binary package. So first
you have a look at popularity-contest's "list of files", that's
in <https://packages.debian.org/> (I'm assuming buster):
https://packages.debian.org/buster/all/popularity-contest/filelist
(Of course you can click your way through to this URL).
I strongly recommend that methodology to those reading this thread
because they have a similar problem. I suspect that in the long term,
having followed the intervening links and cross references will prove
more valuable than the targeted final URLs.
You can see that in /usr/share/doc/... there is a FAQ, a README,
a changelog, a copyright and a subdirectory examples.
Now you go to the corresponding place in <https://sources.debian.org/>:
https://sources.debian.org/src/popularity-contest/1.67/
There they are: FAQ, README and examples (the two missing ones
are Debian infrastructure and live in the subdir debian).
Note that it won't work this way always and 100%, because
package installation /might/ do some magic, which you may
look up in debian/rules, debian/postinst, etc. -- but that's
it, more or less.
Enjoy
-- tomás
Thank you.
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