Nixpkgs: man pages no longer available

Created on 11 May 2016 · 15Comments · Source: NixOS/nixpkgs

Issue description

As of latest unstable, man pages for c functions no longer works.

Steps to reproduce

In /etc/nixos/configuration.nix:

  environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
    ...
    manpages
    ...
  ];

andy@xps:~$ man memcpy
No manual entry for memcpy

Technical details

System: 16.09pre82105.7465bcd (Flounder)
Nix version: nix-env (Nix) 1.11.2

Source

andrewrk

👍3

Most helpful comment

Yeah, more or less. See https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Man_pages for how to get man pages (and https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/11501 for context).

chreekat on 11 Feb 2019

👍2

All 15 comments

Ah, well, sections 2 and 3 are in a separate output. In any case, you should get them if you add manpages.docdev.

Perhaps we could have a top-level alias for these, e.g. man-pages-c. I split them, as those sections seem not needed by most man-page users, and they took the vast majority of space – du reports 8.5 MiB docdev and 1.4 MiB out.

vcunat on 12 May 2016

Ah thanks. This makes sense. As a user though I have no way to know that I should update my configuration (apart from your helpful comment). I'm not sure how to solve this problem though apart from reading every commit to nixpkgs!

andrewrk on 12 May 2016

I also don't know. Note that this isn't much package-specific. man3 pages and gtk-doc are either split or deleted by default.

vcunat on 12 May 2016

Why was this issue closed?

edolstra on 12 May 2016

@edolstra: do you have a suggestion about what to change?

vcunat on 12 May 2016

Propably manpages should not have a split docdev output, or docdev should be installed by default.

edolstra on 12 May 2016

At least, I'm assuming that pretty much the only people who install manpages are developers, but I might be wrong about that...

edolstra on 12 May 2016

I assumed that C(++) systems programming isn't that common, compared to using (shell) commands, but I don't have any statistics about that. I certainly don't feel strongly about either way.

vcunat on 12 May 2016

Example: Debian+Ubuntu split these into manpages-dev package, but our .dev has a bit different meaning than their -dev so it doesn't really seem to fit. Fedora seems not to split them.

vcunat on 23 May 2016

Just confirming. The comment says that man 3 and man 2 are kept in docdev. But the expressions seems to only move man 2:

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/data/documentation/man-pages/default.nix#L12-L17

CMCDragonkai on 28 Jul 2016

@CMCDragonkai: man3 is auto-moved by the generic code https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/build-support/setup-hooks/multiple-outputs.sh#L143. I didn't add any general magic for man2, because I couldn't see any package providing them except for explicit manual packages.

vcunat on 29 Jul 2016

Did this ever get resolved?

$ nix-shell -p manpages --run 'man memcpy'
No manual entry for memcpy
$ nix-shell -p manpages.docdev --run 'man memcpy'
error: attribute 'docdev' missing, at (string):1:94

chris-martin on 9 Aug 2018

👍2

Missing section 3 strikes me as a bug for a standard Linux operating system. Feel free to strip it out of embedded devices, of course. But when lots of utility pages refer to lib pages, it's a poor experience to have them mysteriously missing. (e.g. getopt(1) referring to getopt(3))

chreekat on 19 Dec 2018

Looks like this still isn't solved. Is there a solution ?