¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

This post is a reply to https://tilde.town/~kzimmermann/articles/installing_alpine_manpages.html.

The author describes their experience while attempting to install all man pages for all the packages in use in their system.

The breakdown progression has some valuable insights on how a typical Unix sysadmin addresses a problem. I tend to adopt a similar approach when entering unknown territory.

However, in Alpine Linux, there is a better way.

Solution #

There is a docs metapackage:

% apk info docs
docs-0.2-r6 description:
Meta package for pulling in all documentation

docs-0.2-r6 webpage:
https://alpinelinux.org

docs-0.2-r6 installed size:
4096 B

All you have to do is:

% doas apk add docs
(1/125) Installing mandoc-doc (1.14.6-r13)
(2/125) Installing docs (0.2-r6)
(3/125) Installing libseccomp-doc (2.5.5-r1)
(4/125) Installing busybox-doc (1.36.1-r31)
[...]

Likewise, it is trivial to get rid of all man pages:

% doas apk del docs

I would like to give a few other suggestions to the author, if we were to assume there is no docs metapackage:

• Step 2: You could also cat /etc/apk/world (reference).

• Step 4: combine from moreutils is more user-friendly than comm. I need to look up how to use comm every single time, whereas combine is much easier to remember.

Appendix #

This was also a typical xyproblem example:

• What is the attempt? “I want to install, via apk add, all foo-doc packages for every foo package on my system”.

• What is the end goal? “I want to install all man pages for the installed packages on my system”.