Indeed. All I’m suggesting is a man-osmc package that installs man and the pages for the default installation packages. AFAICT, packages other than original installs do come with man pages (my /usr/share/man is full of stuff)
I think having an external osmc package that installs man and the original man-pages is the best solution hands down. Or a simple tar file with them, I don’t think that matters much as long as you have man installed. Once you have man installed any newly installed packages will have their associated man-pages assuming they come with them.
What do you mean by “OSMC filesystem is created”?
Is this only for a “new” or “clean” install from SD card? If it doesn’t apply to upgrades via “apt-get dist-upgrade”, then it’s no big deal once we have the man pages. A separate “man-omsc” package would make getting them in the first place faster, though.
On the other hand, any update system that nukes existing data files (which is exactly what man pages are) on the disk is broken, and needs to be fixed. A way for a user to circumvent such a delete would be to “cp -a /usr/share/man/*” to a directory on the removable micro SD card, then bind mount /usr/share/man to that new directory, but mount it read only by default. Then, an upgrade can’t nuke it.
The OSMC filesystem is generated before it is included in an installer.
OSMC does not delete any existing data files.
I respectfully disagree.
line 125 ( which is in the cleanup() function) in the scripts/common.sh file reads as follows:
rm -rf ${1}/usr/share/man/*
Several deb files installed data files under the usr/share/man/ directory, and the build script nukes all of them in a non-recoverable way, all to save ~20 MiB of space.
That’s used during the filesystem build process.
We delete man pages during filesystem generation.
But our update system does not delete any files.
Sadly we still have users installing OSMC on 2GB micro SD cards.
A couple of options:
- Ensure all man pages are deleted for consistency as it doesn’t make sense to remove those of just base packages, but not newly installed packages. This can be done with an APT hook.
- Only delete man pages for specific targets (Pi); and not for targets with more space (Vero 4K / PC)
- Delete man pages on first boot and install a hook to delete man pages on first boot if the target media is small.
I’m happy to accept a PR to revise behaviour, if it’s reasonable.
Sam
i confirm that it would be so nice to have a downloadable package with all the deleted manual pages: for non-noob or no-small-sd users
i reinstalled all my pkg to have them all back 
and took a day (and maybe it’s a dangerous way to do it?)
i done it this way
sudo apt install man
sudo apt list | grep installed | cut -d / -f 1 > pk
n=$(wc -l < pk)
for i in $(< pk) ; do
echo "---- $[n--] to go ----"
sudo apt-get install --reinstall $i
doneI am still thinking of a solution.
Sam