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

[Chris G]

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.

-- 
Chris Green