What use are these (rpm) entries in 'man'?

[Chris G]

On Thu, Nov 01, 2007 at 12:12:22PM -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> On Thu, 1 Nov 2007, Chris G wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, Nov 01, 2007 at 11:45:58AM -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> > > On Thu, 1 Nov 2007, 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.
> > > >
> > > > For example if I say "man -k doc" (not a very sensible idea given the
> > > > amount of output it generates!) at the end of the list I see:-
> > > >
> > > >     tiff2pdf             (1)  - convert a TIFF image to a PDF document ugetrlimit [undocumented] (2)  - undocumented system calls
> > > >     xml2po               (1)  - program to create a PO-template file from a DocBook XML file and merge it back into a (translated) XML file
> > > >     xmlwf                (1)  - Determines if an XML document is well-formed
> > > >     xorg-x11-docs       (rpm) - X.Org X11 documentation
> > > >     yelp                (rpm) - A system documentation reader from the Gnome project
> > > >
> > > > Now "man tiff2pdf", "man xml2po" and "man xmlwf" produce some useful
> > > > (?) output but "man xorg-x11-docs" and "man yelp" just say "No
> > > > manual entry for <xxxx>".
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > 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?
> > >
> > > $ man rpm yelp
> > >
> > No, that just returns the man page for rpm and after that says "No
> > manual entry for yelp".
> >
> > The "section number" field to the rpm command only works if it's an
> > integer.
> 
> not always:
> 
>   $ man glob
>   $ man n glob
> 
Wierd!  :-)

In that case I guess it must be that only single-character section
'numbers' are accepted.

-- 
Chris Green