GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 680503
'man' utility is absent from the LiveUSB
Last modified: 2012-07-29 00:01:20 UTC
I was very, very surprised when running man e2fsck from a terminal on the LiveUSB. I would say that 'man' is an essential utility to have no matter how lightweight you want the LiveCD/USB utility to be. Without it people cannot know what to run from the cli, for those cases where GParted doesn't provide a GUI solution.
If you run "du -hs /usr/share/man", you will be surprised, too. There is no any files in /usr/share/man. That's why program "man" is not required. Basically the idea for GParted live is to be small, and for GParted only. If you want to man any command, you can find any Unix/Linux box for that. Steven.
I understand, however: - man pages shouldn't take a huge amount of space (relative to the current size of the .iso) - man pages are essential when the user plays around with the hard drive; one wrong option issued on the cli and the disk is toast As far as I go not shipping man pages and the 'man' utility is strange. Essentially you are telling the user to make full use of all the (rather dangerous) utilities included without providing her the minimum of documentation. (You cannot get more minimalistic than a man page.) What do you make of a user that has her _single_ computer down with _no internet_ access and booted on the spare GParted LiveCD. How is she to look up the documentation? Personally I'm unconvinced that this is a wise approach for a rescue disk.
Sure. Thanks for the comments. I will let Curtis, the GParted project leader, to decide this. Curtis, How do you think about this? Steven.
Hi Liviu, Thank you for your interest in GParted Live. Steven and I try to keep the GParted Live image small, mainly because we release more often than larger GNU/Linux distributions, and we wish make it easier to download for persons with slow Internet connections. Also the primary focus with this distribution is to enable users access to the latest versions of GParted. Having said that we do entertain adding additional commands and features, especially if there is lots of benefit for very little increase in image size. Steven, Would you be able to determine how much space is needed to add the man pages and the man command? Curtis.
Curtis, With man program and the manual files, the iso file will be ~5 MB larger. Steven.
Thanks Steven for the quick response Are the man program and the manual files part of the Clonezilla image? At ~5MB, I think it would be worthwhile proceeding with this change. If you wish, before building another Live image we can wait for decisions on some other livecd enhancement reports. E.g. Bug #680504 regarding adding a File Manager Does that sound reasonable to you?
Please check GParted live 0.13.0-3. Man packages, pcmanfm, and leafpad were added. Steven.
(In reply to comment #7) > Please check GParted live 0.13.0-3. Man packages, pcmanfm, and leafpad were > added. > Sounds great! Thanks.
The added man pages work well for me. I think we can close this bug as resolved.
Thanks for confirming that. Closing this bug.