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Date: Tue, 5 Aug 2014 22:51:07 +0200
From: Polytropon <freebsd@edvax.de>
To: "William A. Mahaffey III" <wam@hiwaay.net>
Subject: Re: pkg question ....
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On Tue, 05 Aug 2014 08:56:17 -0500, William A. Mahaffey III wrote:
> When I do an 
> 'apropos xfce', is says 'xfce: nothing appropriate' .... I did a 
> 'makewhatis -av' & still nothing .... surely there are some man pages ?!?!?!

Please understand that "modern" software does not come with
manpages anymore. Documentation, _if_ it actually exists, is
scattered across the web. You'll find it in discussion forums,
blogs, user home pages, and wikis. Sometimes, there's something
in /usr/local/share, but don't bet your money on it... :-)

No, seriously: Most desktop environments don't have manpages.
Few programs have, because nobody reads them. Still there are
some exceptions, like "man opera", "man openoffice", "man xmms"
or "man gmplayer". On the other hand, try "man firefox", "man kde"
or "man grip".

On one of my older systems where I have XFCE 3 installed, when
I type "man xfce", do you know what happens? A manpage appears!
You can see: Sometimes, someone made a decision not to maintain
manpages anymore and instead concentrate on software features,
look & feal, following the most recent Linux development and
just coding along. This is a _valid_ decision, even though a
minority of 0.01% of the users might not appreciate it. ;-) 



PS. Don't even think about asking for _localized_ manpages
    in a non-english language! :-)


-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...