Why aren’t we using doc-base?
In November 2007 Roberto C. Sanchez filed bug #451690 in irssi: Please include a doc-base registration file.
Including this file isn’t that hard, and while reading the Debian doc-base Manual I found out that “Every Debian package that provides online documentation (other than manual pages) will register these documents to doc-base.”
So, if a missing doc-base registration file is important enough for someone to file a bug on, why does my /usr/share/doc-base/ only contain 69 files compared to the 1444 files in /usr/share/doc/ ?
March 2nd, 2008 at 12:48 am
I guess that reporting a bug against lintian, suggesting doc-base registration when there are html/pdf files shipped under /usr/share/doc might help. I for one would be happy to be reminded of doc-base in an automated fashion. Cheers, -KiBi
March 2nd, 2008 at 3:28 am
doc-base isn’t very useful for desktop systems, since it doesn’t appear in the freedesktop or Debian menus.
March 2nd, 2008 at 9:46 pm
Wow… I’ve used Debian for years (5 maybe?) and never looked in /usr/share/doc-base.
I do remember looking at dwww once and then deciding its far easier to just look in /usr/share/doc/ myself.
March 31st, 2008 at 8:58 pm
This blog post gave me the idea to look into doc-base. I didn’t really know what it was until now. I then installed doccentral and now I have
http://localhost/dc
To look up all my documentation that is registered with doc-base.