0

I'm getting used to Ubuntu Environment, but I don't know a lot of things and I'm still learning about it.

I recently figured out "*-doc" packages are useless inside Ubuntu OS itself.

e.g

when I executed 

show ninja-build-doc

command in terminal, I get result like this => => =>

Package: ninja-build-doc 
Version: 1.5.1-0.1ubuntu1
Priority: optional
Section: universe/doc
Source: ninja-build
Origin: Ubuntu
Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <[email protected]>
Original-Maintainer: Gary Kramlich <[email protected]>
Bugs: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+filebug
Installed-Size: 13.1 MB
Homepage: http://martine.github.com/ninja/
Download-Size: 5,587 kB
APT-Sources: http://kr.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial/universe amd64 Packages
Description: documentation for ninja-build
    Ninja is yet another build system. It takes as input the interdependencies of
    files (typically source code and output executables) and orchestrates
    building them, quickly.
    .
    Ninja joins a sea of other build systems. Its distinguishing goal is to be
    fast. It is born from the Chromium browser project, which has over 30,000
    source files and whose other build systems can take ten seconds to start
    building after changing one file. Ninja is under a second.
    .

    This package contains the doxygen documentation for ninja.

Does -doc package include man page for the package or not? Removing the "-doc" packages would harm my system or not?

Improve this question
1
  • Any reason why you would want this? You are not going to free up a lot of space. We are talking about kBs per doc here.
    – Rinzwind
    Jun 29, 2018 at 9:18

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
2

It depends upon the package. Packagers decide if -doc packages are required, merely recommended, or neither.

-doc packages are not usually the manpage. -doc packages usually include extra documentation, often including helpful examples and/or tutorials.

You can ask apt to remove -doc packages, but READ CAREFULLY apt's offer in response to ensure you are not agreeing to remove much more than you wanted. Alternately, use apt's --simulate flag to test a removal before executing for real.

There are a couple system utilities for handling documentation: doc-base and docbook-xml. We strongly recommend that you leave those in place on your system, unless you really know what you are doing.

Most -doc packages are recommended, not required. During an install, you can use, apt's --no-install-recommends flag to install only required (not recommended) dependencies. HOWEVER, some features of your new software may require other recommended packages, so this is a bit of a blunt tool.

Most users should not need to remove -doc packages, nor care about 'required' vs 'recommended' packages. The whole point of Ubuntu is that the defaults are set to meet the needs of most users without any additional tweaking. -doc packages are generally inert, and the amount of space they use is very, very small.

Improve this answer
0

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .