On 06/28/2018 05:38 AM, Gergely Gombos wrote:
Hello,
Hi Greg,
I just installed a F28 image on a Scaleway cloud server. Runs fine, except there were no man pages, even after installing man-pages package.
It turned out after a lot of searching that this is not a bug but a feature.
Issue on GitHub: https://github.com/fedora-cloud/docker-brew-fedora/issues/9#issuecomment-365176011
So the culprit is the Kickstarts file, here: https://pagure.io/fedora-kickstarts/blob/master/f/fedora-docker-common.ks#_32 (and other nearby .ks files)
It says "%packages --excludedocs --instLangs=en --nocore [...]"
According to the Kickstart docs (http://pykickstart.readthedocs.io/en/latest/kickstart-docs.html#chapter-4-package-selection) this won't install man pages, presumably to save space, but the end user won't know this, because man will simply not find any man pages and that's it.
A solution was to edit /etc/dnf/dnf.conf, comment "tsflags=nodocs" and then reinstall everything with dnf reinstall.
My question: I understand that it's important to save space with containers, but often cloud users wish to use man pages, as they are using the cloud server just as any remote computer. Is there a way to document the above situation e.g. when the user tries to view a man page gets a notification about why they are not installed (and how to install them)?
This is subjective to who you are, but here is my opinion. A "Cloud" server is
usually one that is spun up and provisioned automatically (i.e. a person does
not SSH into the machine to configure it). The cloud instance has a specific
purpose and can be thrown away easily and re-provisioned. In this scenario docs
are wasted space and people generally value smaller image size over having the
documentation.
Now there are certainly cases where you just spin up a cloud instance and want
to configure it yourself, but that's not what we're optimizing for. It would be
nice if 'man' were able to detect this situation and offer an alternative. Maybe
open an RFE BZ against man for this??
- Dusty