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Debian has ~60,000 packages and it'd be pretty impractical-to-impossible to cover them all in a single book. This handbook is about the really common tasks--eve

by chungy 6y ago

Debian has ~60,000 packages and it'd be pretty impractical-to-impossible to cover them all in a single book. This handbook is about the really common tasks--even most of the specifics it goes into, such as with mail servers, LDAP, etc, they have alternative packages and implementations in Debian that aren't covered. Thankfully, most packages are very well-documented, you can usually browse around /usr/share/doc/$PACKAGE to see the upstream documentation and possibly any Debian-specific information. HTML and PDF versions of documentation tend to be in an independent $PACKAGE-doc package, so as to keep the main package rather small.

eitland 6y ago
> Debian has ~60,000 packages and it'd be pretty impractical-to-impossible to cover them all in a single book. I'd admit my question wasn't the best, so I try again: I'm talking about a howto that describes how to apply a number of the small conveniences that Ubuntu has by default but that seems to be optional on Debian: - bash completion - man pages (at least they are lacking in the Debian wsl edition) - etc I figure this stuff out, it only takes 5 minutes every time I notice something is missing bjt I'm fairly sure I've seen a Debian enthusiast here saying there's a short how to on how to configure the end user aspects of debian cli, and that is the thing I'm looking for :-)
mistrial9 6y ago
odd, I find the docs to be routinely missing, often substituted by a some kind of shell text file with a gz compression on it (?) first look on an old system: /usr/share/doc/amd64-microcode /usr/share/doc/anacron /usr/share/doc/apache2 /usr/share/doc/apache2-bin /usr/share/doc/apache2-data all fit that pattern
- zingshue 6y ago
  try zcat on the gz'ed files.
- chungy 6y ago
  > odd, I find the docs to be routinely missing, often substituted by a some kind of shell text file with a gz compression on it (?) They're just compressed. Have you tried zless?
  - rzzzt 6y ago
    On some systems, less can automatically detect gzip compression via lesspipe: https://github.com/wofr06/lesspipe https://github.com/wofr06/lesspipe
- bayindirh 6y ago
  gzipping documents is a long tradition. Most common text reading tools (cat, more, less, grep, diff, and some more) has "z" variants which work on gzipped files directly, without ungzipping them. Most of the tools bigger documentations come in man and info files. If there's an even bigger, additional documentation, it comes with -doc package (like apache2-doc). Otherwise every package comes with some basic documentation and Debian specific changes file, most of the time. Debian's specifics on packaging is very strict. You just cannot package something and publish in the main repo.
  - rleigh 6y ago
    It was always somewhat annoying though, particularly when it broke inter-document links, and it was a legacy of older times. Today, it's way past time to drop individual file compression. I mean, we have transparent compression with systems like ZFS, so there's no penalty to pay by half-assing it with gzip.
    - bayindirh 6y ago
      If Linux was a big-iron only OS, I could happily agree but, this stubborn thing works from Raspberries to mainframes and everything in between. So it's not always possible to run it on a CPU which can drive an ZFS on a multi-disk enclosure. I'd rather have individually compressed files instead of running a heavier FS layer with smaller/less powerful systems.
- mistrial9 6y ago
  no, I meant that to save space, more complete docs are replaced by one or two terse files (that also also gzipped).
- pvaldes 6y ago
  all packages have its man but many packaged have also option al doc packages (i.e if you have installed foo look for a foo-doc package). I still remember the HOWTO text files

by chungy 6y ago

eitland 6y ago

> Debian has ~60,000 packages and it'd be pretty impractical-to-impossible to cover them all in a single book. I'd admit my question wasn't the best, so I try again: I'm talking about a howto that describes how to apply a number of the small conveniences that Ubuntu has by default but that seems to be optional on Debian: - bash completion - man pages (at least they are lacking in the Debian wsl edition) - etc I figure this stuff out, it only takes 5 minutes every time I notice something is missing bjt I'm fairly sure I've seen a Debian enthusiast here saying there's a short how to on how to configure the end user aspects of debian cli, and that is the thing I'm looking for :-)

mistrial9 6y ago

odd, I find the docs to be routinely missing, often substituted by a some kind of shell text file with a gz compression on it (?) first look on an old system: /usr/share/doc/amd64-microcode /usr/share/doc/anacron /usr/share/doc/apache2 /usr/share/doc/apache2-bin /usr/share/doc/apache2-data all fit that pattern

zingshue 6y ago
try zcat on the gz'ed files.
chungy 6y ago
> odd, I find the docs to be routinely missing, often substituted by a some kind of shell text file with a gz compression on it (?) They're just compressed. Have you tried zless?
- rzzzt 6y ago
  On some systems, less can automatically detect gzip compression via lesspipe: https://github.com/wofr06/lesspipe https://github.com/wofr06/lesspipe
bayindirh 6y ago
gzipping documents is a long tradition. Most common text reading tools (cat, more, less, grep, diff, and some more) has "z" variants which work on gzipped files directly, without ungzipping them. Most of the tools bigger documentations come in man and info files. If there's an even bigger, additional documentation, it comes with -doc package (like apache2-doc). Otherwise every package comes with some basic documentation and Debian specific changes file, most of the time. Debian's specifics on packaging is very strict. You just cannot package something and publish in the main repo.
- rleigh 6y ago
  It was always somewhat annoying though, particularly when it broke inter-document links, and it was a legacy of older times. Today, it's way past time to drop individual file compression. I mean, we have transparent compression with systems like ZFS, so there's no penalty to pay by half-assing it with gzip.
  - bayindirh 6y ago
    If Linux was a big-iron only OS, I could happily agree but, this stubborn thing works from Raspberries to mainframes and everything in between. So it's not always possible to run it on a CPU which can drive an ZFS on a multi-disk enclosure. I'd rather have individually compressed files instead of running a heavier FS layer with smaller/less powerful systems.
mistrial9 6y ago
no, I meant that to save space, more complete docs are replaced by one or two terse files (that also also gzipped).
pvaldes 6y ago
all packages have its man but many packaged have also option al doc packages (i.e if you have installed foo look for a foo-doc package). I still remember the HOWTO text files