man pages on the bionic master images are deactivated

[ocordes]

Hi,

currently I do not know if this a BUG or a feature or nice to have issue, so please be kind and put a necessary flag on it.

My situation is such that we want to use repo2docker from a binderhub installation to train students to use bash. The notebook system is well suitable for this and for python we are often use this system. However, using bash in a notebook terminal and the bash kernel has the lack of man pages which we can install of course with apt.txt but the base bionic image has deactivated the creation/usage of manpages. One article refers this issue:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/54152906/how-to-install-man-pages-on-an-ubuntu-docker-image

It is possible to include:

RUN sed -i '/path-exclude=/usr/share/man//c#path-exclude=/usr/share/man/' /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/excludes

in your docker creation flow? With the current user permissions it is not possible to add any command as root despite of creating an individual Dockerfile of course which is not practicable.

Of course, if you know a better possibility to execute above command as root inside the docker build process let me know!

Cheers, Oliver

[betatim]

There is currently no way to run a command as root without making your own Dockerfile.

I don't know what the reasoning is behind disabling man pages. My guess is that it has something to do with size of the image. The effect on size is definitely something to check before making this change permanent. So as a next step I'd try to find out why man pages are disabled in the first place and perform a quick experiment to see how much bigger the images get.

[davidrpugh]

Here is related issue thread that I came across that discuss some of the reasoning.

https://github.com/tianon/docker-brew-ubuntu-core/issues/122

I have been looking for a way to restore the man pages for my teaching repos. In particular I teach Software Carpentry Bash courses using terminal within JupyterLab and would like to have the man pages. All solutions that I have found require running some command as root.

[MattF-NSIDC]

I'm going to be running a workshop next week and just discovered the lack of man pages in our image. Is there any workaround for this?

All solutions that I have found require running some command as root.

Have found the same. And I'm not sure how to do a clean migration to using a Dockerfile without creating any regressions in our image.

[MattF-NSIDC]

Here's how we resolved this problem for our workshop, but it added ~3GB to the image size. I'd like to find a more space-optimized solution, since I think unminimize is doing more than just bringing back man pages.