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: archlinux.org/packages/core/an

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 In fairness the docs do say you may need other packages, but no manpages? No dhcp client? GIve me a fucking break.

@sullybiker @nytpu You don't want manpages or the man tool in your container that you won't ever ssh into. I'm assuming this is the usecase.

@clacke @nytpu They do provide container images where that would be appropriate.

@sullybiker @nytpu Maybe they should have packages named like "bare", "cli-base" and "desktop-base" to be clearer.

(maybe they do, I don't know Arch)
@sullybiker @nytpu I quickly[0]β€Œ ran arch in a container to check if man or man-db have any reverse dependencies. They don't! Can that be true? So if you install a whole Gnome desktop, you still can't assume that man will be there?

# 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



[0]β€Œ Apart from running into a glibc bug (is there a kernel interface missing?) and picking an image from last year to run instead. bugs.archlinux.org/task/69563
@sullybiker @nytpu Why is that Required-By different from the pacman -Qiβ€Œ Required-By?

So it seems the "cli-base" package that makes things pleasant to interact with is the "posix" package.

@clacke @nytpu I think it's a mistake. The localised man pages require it, but not the English language ones. That seems broken to me.

@clacke @sullybiker pacman is not aware of package groups unless you explicitly look at them (pacman -Si posix), and no β€œreal” packages require it, so it looks empty.

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