[SOLVED] Why such Spotty Man Page Coverage in Ubuntu?

mejohnsn · 01-25-2010, 12:59 PM

I have seen other posts claiming Ubuntu is thorough in man page coverage, but that has not been my experience.

On the contrary: just this morning, on my Ubuntu 9.10 system, I typed "man dmesg", saw it referred to "syslogd(8)", then typed "man syslogd" and it came back with "no manual entry for syslogd".

Now just to be fair, that particular failure occurs on Fedora 11 too. But even so, I have this impression that I have run into such a problem more frequently with my Ubuntu system than my Fedora system.

Can anyone explain what is going on here, and how to get more complete man page coverage?

AlucardZero · 01-25-2010, 04:51 PM

Code:

alucard@thrawn:~$ apt-file search /usr/share/man/man8/syslogd.8.gz
inetutils-syslogd: /usr/share/man/man8/syslogd.8.gz
sysklogd: /usr/share/man/man8/syslogd.8.gz

Probably because you have rsyslogd installed instead of sysklogd or inetutils-syslogd. So I guess - install the programs they come with, or live without

mejohnsn · 02-06-2010, 01:39 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by AlucardZero

Code:

alucard@thrawn:~$ apt-file search /usr/share/man/man8/syslogd.8.gz
inetutils-syslogd: /usr/share/man/man8/syslogd.8.gz
sysklogd: /usr/share/man/man8/syslogd.8.gz

Probably because you have rsyslogd installed instead of sysklogd or inetutils-syslogd. So I guess - install the programs they come with, or live without

The final line of your code citation suggested how to verify what version/varint of syslogd is installed on Ubuntu 9.10: it is in fact rsyslogd.

So now I can find the man pages, so I will mark this as solved, even though the generic problem is still not solved. That generic problem is still: why the man pages included in Ubuntu refer to the wrong variants of software installed on the system. It still sounds like someone at Canonical is not doing his job.

Of course, the problem may be common among distributions, since it is not an easy problem to solve.