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4romany

Member

Registered: 2021-11-27

Posts: 25

(Solved) What is the "right way" to view documents in /usr/share/doc/

So this is probably a really stupid question but wanted to ask.   I've been playing around with pipewire and a session manager for it - wireplumber.   I've "installed"  the docs (from main repository) for wireplumber  - and they show up in  /usr/share/doc/wireplumber.   If I go to that directory there is a "html" folder -  and inside of that I can click on the "index.html" - and from there I can browse the various topics - all good.  But all that is assuming that I knew to LOOK in /usr/share/doc for help.   For more experience folks what would they do to look for package documentation?   I get it that /usr/share/doc is the place where that info would be locally stored - but is there a "better" way outside of looking in the doc directory?

Last edited by 4romany (2022-04-05 21:12:11)

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,484

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Re: (Solved) What is the "right way" to view documents in /usr/share/doc/

Not really.  The directory /usr/share/doc is pretty much a catch-all for any miscellaneous "documentation" that doesn't follow any real standard.  The most relevant standards would be man pages or info pages (the latter is much more common among GNU software).  And these each have standardized interfaces and ways to search for and view them (e.g., man / apropos for man pages).

Anything else is just what it is.  There could be text files, markdown, html, xml, or whatever the upstream source decided to distribute.  There is no standard way to view them - many could be opened in a text editor, html files of course would be better in a browser.

You can use pacman to list all the files for a package to see what if any documentation was packaged with it along with where it is.

A few aur packages by a particularly lazy upstream developer that I know quite well tend to just have well-commented config files as the primary source of "documentation" and these might be in /usr/share/doc or /usr/share/$pkgname.

There seems to be a pattern that more "professional" or well-polished and well-maintained software tends to use /usr/share/doc for some formalities that most "end users" might not normally care about like change logs or readme files describing build-time configuration.  But these packages would likely also have well written man pages stored in /usr/share/man.

Last edited by Trilby (2022-04-04 16:13:26)

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"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

4romany

Member

Registered: 2021-11-27

Posts: 25

Re: (Solved) What is the "right way" to view documents in /usr/share/doc/

Hey - thanks for that detailed response Trilby.   You answered my primary question by explaining there is no "one log to bind them"  method :-0 - and that works for me.