What use are these (rpm) entries in 'man'?
Robert P. J. Day
rpjday at crashcourse.ca
Thu Nov 1 15:57:23 UTC 2007
On Fri, 2 Nov 2007, Tim wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-11-01 at 14:49 +0000, Chris G wrote:
> > 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?
>
> I would *guess* so. You'd usually find non-man file documentation
> in: /usr/share/doc/<name-of-package-probably-with-version-numbers>/
>
> You could always use the rpm -ql command to see what's included in a
> package, and installed where.
>
> [tim at suspishus ~]$ apropos yelp
> yelp (rpm) - A system documentation reader from the Gnome project
>
> [tim at suspishus ~]$ man yelp
> No manual entry for yelp
>
> [tim at suspishus ~]$ rpm -ql yelp
> /etc/gconf/schemas/yelp.schemas
> /usr/bin/gnome-help
> /usr/bin/yelp
> /usr/share/applications/gnome-yelp.desktop
> /usr/share/doc/yelp-2.18.1
> /usr/share/doc/yelp-2.18.1/AUTHORS
> /usr/share/doc/yelp-2.18.1/COPYING
> /usr/share/doc/yelp-2.18.1/ChangeLog
> /usr/share/doc/yelp-2.18.1/MAINTAINERS
> /usr/share/doc/yelp-2.18.1/NEWS
> /usr/share/doc/yelp-2.18.1/README
> /usr/share/gnome/help
> /usr/share/icons/hicolor/192x192/apps/yelp-icon-big.png
> /usr/share/locale/af/LC_MESSAGES/yelp.mo
> /usr/share/locale/am/LC_MESSAGES/yelp.mo
> /usr/share/locale/ar/LC_MESSAGES/yelp.mo
> /usr/share/locale/az/LC_MESSAGES/yelp. ...[snipped]...
upon closer inspection, any man entry claiming to be part of (rpm)
would seem to be just plain broken.
typically, that identifier represents the section of the
documentation under which you'd find the man page, which would be a
subdirectory of /usr/share/man, below:
bg fr ja man3 man7 pl.ISO8859-2 sl
cs fr.ISO8859-1 ko man3p man7x pl.UTF-8 sv
da fr.UTF-8 man man3x man8 pt tr
de hr man0p man4 man8x pt_BR zh_CN
el hu man1 man4x man9 ro zh_TW
en id man1p man5 man9x ru
eo it man1x man5x mann ru.KOI8-R
es it.ISO8859-1 man2 man6 nl ru.UTF-8
fi it.UTF-8 man2x man6x pl sk
but, as you can see, there's nothing that appears to correspond to
the "rpm" section, which makes me believe that the "yelp" package
*internally* has something that (mistakenly) claims that its man page
is in that non-existent section.
easy enough to check:
$ yumdownloader --source yelp
... install, build prep, cd BUILD/yelp
$ grep -rw rpm *
src/yelp-search-parser.c: /* RH man inserts rpm references into the whatis database */
src/yelp-search-parser.c: if (g_str_has_prefix (line[1], "rpm)"))
$
aha! j'accuse! without looking any further, it sure seems like
there's something there that claims to be affiliated with "rpm". at
first glance, that would seem to be a bugzilla-able bug, but i'll
leave that up to someone else.
rday
p.s. looking at the actual file list with "rpm -ql yelp" leads one to
believe that that package doesn't even *come* with a man page.
--
========================================================================
Robert P. J. Day
Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry
Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA
http://crashcourse.ca
========================================================================
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