On 30/05/2020 10:52, 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 > . > > 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? The source code for Debian packages is available, without dowloading the deb, at https://sources.debian.org/. For `popularity-contest`, in particular, you can find the source code at https://sources.debian.org/src/popularity-contest/1.70/ But how do we map from the source code to documentation installed on a system? Well, the main file which controls how to make a deb from a source directory is in the file "debian/rules" (Note for history: saying that "Something Rules" was a fashionable way of expressing that that thing was worthy of public approval due to being popular, interesting or in any other way extraordinary). So, if you look at https://sources.debian.org/src/popularity-contest/1.70/debian/rules/ you should see a command invokation of "dh_installdocs README FAQ". This tells dh (debhelper) to install the mentioned files as documentation. Therefore, the answer to your question is: https://sources.debian.org/src/popularity-contest/1.70/README https://sources.debian.org/src/popularity-contest/1.70/FAQ And, hopefully, you can see how to find the documentation for other packages, too. > > NOTE BENE > This post is about man pages as a class. > > >
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