I get Arch's whole minimalist thing, I really do. But not even providing man-db in Base? C'mon people. That's just absurd.
@sullybiker holy shit base is so absurd: https://archlinux.org/packages/core/any/base/
i mean, i understand that the entire point of base is purely to provide the necessary utilities to install more packages and you're not supposed to actually be using it to do anything else, but you'd think being at least equivalent in utilities to a heavily gutted busybox compile.
@nytpu I'm glad it's not just me. I'm helping someone whom I recommended it to and I'm having 2nd thoughts. A lot of this is just silly.
@sullybiker the kernel itself is an optional dependency for installing arch wtf
@nytpu Correction manpages are there but no tool to read them lmao
@nytpu In fairness the docs do say you may need other packages, but no manpages? No dhcp client? GIve me a fucking break.
@sullybiker @clacke all install directions tell you to also install base-devel, but the thing is that it doesn't include man-db either! maybe they should also recommend posix just so you at least have a stable posix base even if you do want to stay minimal.
# pacman -Qi man-db Name : man-db Version : 2.9.4-1 Description : A utility for reading man pages Architecture : x86_64 URL : https://www.nongnu.org/man-db/ Licenses : GPL LGPL Groups : None Provides : man Depends On : bash gdbm zlib groff libpipeline less libseccomp Optional Deps : gzip [installed] Required By : None Optional For : None Conflicts With : man Replaces : man Installed Size : 2.26 MiB Packager : Andreas Radke <andyrtr@archlinux.org> Build Date : Tue 09 Feb 2021 06:36:13 AM UTC Install Date : Tue 23 Feb 2021 05:44:16 AM UTC Install Reason : Explicitly installed Install Script : Yes Validated By : Signature
@clacke @sullybiker pacman is not aware of package groups unless you explicitly look at them (pacman -Si posix), and no “real” packages require it, so it looks empty.
I found this out because I wanted to read the nmcli documentation. I couldn't connect to my wifi to download Man-db because I couldn't read the fucking manpage that tells you how to do it.