Re: Something is buggy - was [Re: Debian man pages have annoying feature(sic)]

[Richard Owlett <rowlett@cloud85.net>]

On 06/02/2020 08:45 AM, The Wanderer wrote:
> On 2020-06-02 at 09:05, Richard Owlett wrote:
>
> > On 06/01/2020 05:02 PM, Richard Owlett wrote:
> >
> > > On 06/01/2020 04:02 PM, Ralph Katz wrote:
>
> > > > apt show debian-goodies
> > > > ...
> > > > debman     - Easily view man pages from a binary .deb without extracting
> > > >                  [man, apt* (via debget)]
> > > >
> > > > So...  ~$ dman packagename   # will fetch the manpages as though they
> > > > were local.
> > > >
> > > > Regards,
> > > > Ralph
> > >
> > >
> > > Thank you. Looks interesting.
> > > 1st didn't work even after installing debian-goodies.
> > > Suspect operator. Leaving now. will pursue in morning.
>
> > Copy and paste this morning from MATE terminal
> > > richard@defaultinstall:~$ dman gforth
> > > bash: dman: command not found
> > > richard@defaultinstall:~$ debman gforth
> > > Usage: debman [options] [-- man(1) options] <man page name> ...
> > >
> > > Options should be exactly one of:
> > >          -f package.deb          read pages from package.deb archive
> > >          -p package              download .deb for package and read pages
> > >                                  from there
> > > richard@defaultinstall:~$ debman -p gforth
> > > Usage: debman [options] [-- man(1) options] <man page name> ...
> > >
> > > Options should be exactly one of:
> > >          -f package.deb          read pages from package.deb archive
> > >          -p package              download .deb for package and read pages
> > >                                  from there
> > > richard@defaultinstall:~$ debman -f gforth.deb
> > > Usage: debman [options] [-- man(1) options] <man page name> ...
> > >
> > > Options should be exactly one of:
> > >          -f package.deb          read pages from package.deb archive
> > >          -p package              download .deb for package and read pages
> > >                                  from there
> > > richard@defaultinstall:~$
> >
> > I have verified that both
> > https://manpages.debian.org/stretch/gforth/gforth.1.en.html
> >     and
> > https://manpages.debian.org/buster/gforth/gforth.1.en.html
> >
> > Help please.
>
> I've dug into this, and while I thought at first there was a bug here
> myself, I've figured it out.
>
> The command lines you're giving are specifying the package name, but not
> the name of the man page. The "<man page name>" argument at the end of
> the usage section is not optional.
>
> For example,
>
> $ debman -p gforth vmgen
>
> works fine for me.

For what I was trying to do, I should have written
  debman -p gforth gforth
instead of
  debman -p gforth

My problem with dman revolves around running Stretch and debian.org 
defaulting to serving up information about "stable" {i.e. Buster}.

My bandwidth constraints cause me to purchase DVD sets to upgrade. And 
this time I had to purchase a flash drive instead instead of physical 
DVDs. The intended target machine cannot boot from a flash drive so I 
got delayed by housekeeping chores.

More later.
Thank you.

> If you need to find out the name of the actual man page (since, e.g., it
> isn't intuitively obvious that gforth will contain a man page for the
> name 'vmgen'), something like
>
> $ apt-file show gforth | grep /man/
>
> ought to do it; just drop the leading path (up through the final '/')
> and the trailing ".X.gz" (where X is a number) from each filename, and
> it should be a valid man-page argument to debman.
>
> (I'm not sure what it will do if there's a package which installs two
> man pages with the same name but different sections, because I haven't
> yet found any examples of packages which do that.)