It’s not clear what the exact syntax would look like, but yes there will be some way to specify in the snapcraft.yaml what manpages should be installed on the system when the snap is installed (and implemented in such a way that removing the snap removes those manpages).
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Thanks a lot! That covers everything I want to do. I just want to be able to type (for example) man grep. The difficult part is probably to design for zfs and git style when manpages are broken up in subcommands.
Has there been any progress on this?
@jdstrand, no unfortunately not. The latest is some info from folks here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/snapd/+bug/1575593, and a PR opened by @chipaca here: https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/pull/8079. At some point we may try to pick that up, but folks are certainly welcome to build on that PR and try to push it through. I think that @zyga also landed some changes a bit ago which makes this easier (by providing a feature through which snapd can more easily export files from a snap to the host’s OS)
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Reviving this thread as I have a need for shipping man-pages with microovn.
The microovn snap is built from among other things the Open vSwitch (OVS) and Open Virtual Network (OVN) projects.
These projects provide detailed reference documentation as system manual pages distributed with the project.
I have heard from a colleague in the HPC team that they would also be interested in man-pages cc @nuccitheboss.
For fun I made an attempt at shipping the requirements with the snap, but I fear the people who want to read those pages will have a hard time finding the command regardless of how well it is documented.
Other things I’m contemplating is to request permission to write to /etc/manpath.config through the system-files interface or ~/.manpath through the personal-files interface but that also does not feel great.
It feels very much like infrastructure that snapd and snapcraft ought to provide?
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