On Fri, Nov 02, 2007 at 09:49:17AM -0500, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
> >
> > Adding the (rpm) entries means that the whatis database is no longer a
> > "set of database files containing short descriptions of system
> > commands" because the things it puts in there are *not* system
> > commands.
> >
> It looks like the apropos needs to be updated, because the whatis
> database and the output of apropos has not been limited to just
> system commands for years.
>
> As far as not being useful, that depends on the user. It may not be
> useful to you, but I find it handy when I can't remember the name of
> the command I need, and it does not have a man page. I can still use
> apropos to find it because of the (rpm) listing. I can also find out
> what a command does using whatis, and because it is a (rpm) entry, I
> know to try other things besides man to find information on it.
> (info, /usr/share/doc/<package>, rpm, etc.)
>
The problem is though that it returns (rpm) listings which are not
commands. My original posting was prompted by my attempt to find the
names of commands that come with Docutils, so I entered 'man -k
docutils' which returned:-
python-docutils (rpm) - A system for processing plaintext documentation
"python-docutils" isn't anything really, certainly not a command.
Entering "yum info python-docutils" does produce some output but it
relates more to packaging and installation than to the utilities
provided.
--
Chris Green
