Man pages in cloud images - documentation
Hello,
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-...
So the culprit is the Kickstarts file, here:
https://pagure.io/fedora-kickstarts/blob/master/f/fedora-docker-common.ks... (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...)
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)?
Thanks!
Best regards,
Greg Gombos