On Fri, 2 Nov 2007, Chris G wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 01, 2007 at 06:31:14PM -0400, Nalin Dahyabhai wrote:
> > On Thu, Nov 01, 2007 at 02:49:56PM +0000, Chris G wrote:
> > > When I do a "man -k <xxxx>" on my Fedora 7 system to search for
> > > documentation about something I get quite a few responses which have
> > > "(rpm)" as the manual section. These seem to be of little use becuase
> > > there isn't an actual corresponding man page as far as I can see.
> > [snip]
> > > So what is the point of these (rpm) entries? Do they somehow indicate
> > > that there is some sort of documentation there, if so how do I get at
> > > it?
> >
> > The "apropos" command (or "man -k") just does a quick search of the
> > "whatis" database, which isn't exactly the same as searching man pages.
> > The result is more or less what you would get from grepping the
> > /var/cache/man/whatis file directly.
> >
> > As it turns out, we've been adding package names and summaries to the
> > whatis database for a while now (#175595).
> >
> OK, so *why* have you been adding this stuff to the whatis database?
> To my mind it's just misleading as when I do (for example) a "man -k
> docutils" I see:-
>
> python-docutils (rpm) - A system for processing plaintext documentation
>
> but it doesn't give me any clue at all where to find documentation
> for docutils.
i'm not sure what the problem is here. if you see output along the
lines of
fubar (1) - one line of info here
that tells you that there's a man page you can read. on the other
hand, if all you see is
fubar (rpm) - info
then that tells you that there's no man page entry, but at least
you're getting *some* information. and some info is generally better
than nothing.
the only confusion up till now has been misunderstanding what that
"(rpm)" string meant, but now that we know, it's no big deal.
rday
--
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Robert P. J. Day
Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry
Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA
http://crashcourse.ca
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