[Techtalk] Question on distro....

[David Merrill]

On Tue, Feb 26, 2002 at 11:36:17AM -0500, Malcolm wrote:
> On Tuesday 26 February 2002 12:55 am, Terri Oda wrote:
> 
> > I second Raven in saying that the debian minimal install is *very*
> > minimal.  The one that got me is that man isn't installed.  All the pages
> > are there, and I could gzip and cat 'em to my heart's content, but no man
> > binary!  Very odd and rather silly, in my opinion.
> 
> Silly I agree with. I have no clue why they wouldn't install 'man'. Not 
> particuarly odd though, as man pages are generally installed by the package 
> they belong to, so each package will install it's pages even if 'man' is not 
> installed.

The guideline for the Debian base install is that you get only the
tools you need to boot and operate the system. The whole point is to
make it small enough for very limited machines. I think that's a sound
approach personally. You go "drat, no man?" followed by "apt-get
install man" and you're done. Thanks to apt-get it's not a big deal
really. :-)

-- 
David C. Merrill                         http://www.lupercalia.net
Linux Documentation Project                   david at lupercalia.net
Collection Editor & Coordinator            http://www.linuxdoc.org

Microsoft does not hesitate to use its operating system monopoly power and
application program dominance to try to eliminate competition.
	--Apple Computer Senior VP Avadis Tevanian Jr.