OpenSUSE doesn't install manpages

[davidpiano]

Description

Does proot-distro intentionally disable the installation of man pages?

I'm using the proot-distro of OpenSUSE. It is set up to "look across" into /data/data/com.termux/files/usr/share/man to find all the Termux man pages, which is obviously good – so far.

But when I install anything inside the proot-distro, there is no man page installed for it anywhere. /usr/share/man and /usr/local/man (and their subdirectories) do exist inside the proot-distro, but they're empty, even though I've installed a lot of stuff. Subdirectories in /var/cache/man are empty, too. To check on this, I installed the man-pages package from the primary repo for OpenSUSE, described as "A large collection of man pages (documentation) from the Linux Documentation Project (LDP)". The installation appeared to succeed, but I can't read them or see where they went. I ran mandb and makewhatis myself in case that was the problem, but still nothing.

It confuses me that installing a pack of man-pages "succeeds" but they're not here. It makes me wonder if installation of other packages can silently fail, too.

[Biswa96]

proot-distro does not modify the packages inside a Linux distribution. Your distribution may split man pages into separate package. For example, Alpine Linux uses *-doc package name.

[davidpiano]

Hmm. Maybe a lot of packages simply don't include manuals at all. But this doesn't explain successfully installing a 4.6 MiB package of man pages that don't appear anywhere.

[Biswa96]

zypper what-provides or zypper wp (exact match) or zypper se --provides (fuzzy match) displays packages which provide the given file.¹

Footnotes

1. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman/Rosetta ↩

[davidpiano]

Yes... it's the "I literally installed a big package of manuals (plus a forced reinstall), and they can't be found by the man system or by a manual search" that's really making me think something isn't right.

My thought is maybe it's a packager's error and manuals are being "successfully" installed using a prefix that doesn't exist - but I don't know if that's even possible.

[sylirre]

OpenSUSE distribution tarball is generated from Docker image. The image itself could be minimized - a reason why one may not find manpages or something like.

[sylirre]

https://build.opensuse.org/projects/openSUSE:Factory/packages/opensuse-tumbleweed-image/files/config.sh suggests that docs are disabled

Check configuration in /etc/zypp/zypp.conf, there could be line rpm.install.excludedocs.

[davidpiano]

Check configuration in /etc/zypp/zypp.conf, there could be line rpm.install.excludedocs.

Exactly this. Changing it from yes to no allows future installs to include manpages. zypper inr does not cause manpages to be installed for existing applications as a result; they only get installed on an update to the package (or a forced reinstall, I guess).

Thank you for your help.

[davidpiano]

From my (selfish) point of view, this issue is solved; sylirre's explanation was 100% correct, and the solution is simple. If any fix is required at all, I guess it would be one of these:

1. Inform people at distro install time that documentation is disabled, and where to change /etc/zypp/zypp.conf if they want to get it
2. Edit the /etc/zypp/zypp.conf that's in the tarball

But option 1 might be easier said than done, and option 2 is undesirable for anyone who's trying not to waste storage space. So I guess fallback options 3 and 4 are "add a sentence to a wiki" or "nothing".

[sylirre]

In next proot-distro release I will try to address this issue and provide the normal opensuse rootfs. Will keep this ticket opened currently.

[sylirre]

Fixed in v4.22.0