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

[Chris G]

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.

-- 
Chris Green