6

Here on unix.com, there are man pages for 

gvfs-cat            gvfs-less           gvfs-monitor-dir    gvfs-move           gvfs-rm             gvfs-trash          
gvfs-copy           gvfs-ls             gvfs-monitor-file   gvfs-open           gvfs-save           gvfs-tree           
gvfs-info           gvfs-mkdir          gvfs-mount          gvfs-rename         gvfs-set-attribute

But every year I see that there are more commands without man pages or apropos descriptions! Why is that? Where can I find documentation for all gvfs commands?

Zanna
  • 69,223
  • 56
  • 216
  • 327
Pili Garcia
  • 61
  • 4
  • You should file a bug, I think the package is gvfs-bin: `ubuntu-bug gvfs-bin` -- Actually, here are the bug reports: https://bugs.launchpad.net/debian/+source/gvfs/+bug/208596 and http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=520377 – Savvas Radevic Sep 19 '12 at 09:49
  • Package `gvfs-common` in ubuntu quantal (future release in October 2012) includes the manual pages: http://packages.ubuntu.com/quantal/all/gvfs-common/filelist – Savvas Radevic Sep 19 '12 at 10:10
  • Do you think that helps? Is anybody reading that? The bug was reported in 2008 – Pili Garcia Sep 19 '12 at 10:16
  • They just need to copy+paste the man pages from other linuxes – Pili Garcia Sep 19 '12 at 10:24
  • 1
    @PiliGarcia: Ubuntu could not "copy+paste" from other linuxes because **no linux had these pages**. Remember Solaris is not Linux. One cannot "copy+paste" from them, just like they cannot from your beloved MacOS, because they didn't *exist*. They had to be created first, *and they were* – MestreLion Sep 19 '12 at 11:37
  • Even if one could copy-paste, that would have to be discussed at Launchpad, not here. – nanofarad Sep 22 '12 at 20:56

1 Answers1

7

As you may have noticed, these man pages were made by Sun for for Solaris, so Ubuntu cannot simply copy them due to copyright restrictions. The solution is for upstream (in this case, Gnome) to create the man pages themselves.

And, as already pointed out in the comments, this was requested via bug reports in both Ubuntu and Debian circa 2008. There were also many bugs filed directly upstream about this issue.

I personally filed a request to Gnome in 2011, and attached the *.1.gz man pages files from Solaris as a suggestion. They were not directly used (for technical reasons), but a few months later they created and included the man pages for all gvfs commands.

The upstream git commit including the man pages is quite recent, from June/2012 (and a few more included and then polished in August/2012), thus after Ubuntu 12.04 Precise was released.

Then, both Ubuntu and Debian must wait for a new upstream version to be released after. That only happened in 2012-07-16 in gvfs 1.13.3 and 2012-08-12 in gvfs 1.13.5.

But gvfs in Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal is currently at 1.13.7, so the man pages are there in gvfs-common package

See, the system works ;-)

MestreLion
  • 19,731
  • 12
  • 87
  • 108