Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 145737
httpd-manual package is missing
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:07:06 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; SunOS sun4u; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020719 Netscape/7.0 Description of problem: There is no httpd-manual package available (although the whole /manual/ subtree is still present in source .tar.gz file in the .src.rpm). Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): httpd-2.0.46-44.ent How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. On the RHEL3u4/WS installation CD 3 there are just three packages - httpd-2.0.46-44.ent.i386.rpm, - httpd-devel-2.0.46-44.ent.i386.rpm, - mod_ssl-2.0.46-44.ent.i386.rpm. Expected Results: 4th related package - httpd-manual-2.0.46-44.ent.i386.rpm Additional info:
Thanks for contacting us. From RHEL3 onwards, the httpd manual is no longer redistributed in packaged form. The Apache website has an always-up-to-date copy of the 2.0 documentation: http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/
Is there some logical explanation why that was decided so? The .src.rpm still contains all the manuals, and you're just avoiding the -manual subpackage. User should have local access to documentation, corresponding to the version of software installed on his system, not necessarily to the latest vesrion of the manual on the web (which may be inaccessible for some reason(s)).
Sure, it's trade-off: - PRO: always accessible local copy - CON: local copy isn't usable anyway if local httpd isn't running due to use of typemap files for .html - CON: size (ever-increasing as more translations are added upstream) - CON: continually out-of-date/maintenance burdern The upstream manual does address versioning concerns, any features only present in say 2.0.49 will be marked as such. The RHEL manuals do also cover Apache configuration. It's also easy to set up a caching reverse proxy to the upstream sources, i.e.: ProxyPass /manual http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/ # ... + caching setup
> The upstream manual does address versioning concerns, any features > only present in say 2.0.49 will be marked as such. Because RedHat rather often backports new features to previous stable versions of packages, sometimes it's hard to say which feature set is available with this particular package. And in all cases documentation should be available locally (no matter how easy it can be found on the web. In Apache's case I personally have some doubts about reliablility of the .org TLD.) RedHat has commited to support RHEL3 for 5 years, till the end of 2008, or so. What if Apache project will cease to exist in December, 2005 [for example]?
Oh, please accept my apologies, I need to eat humble pie: the -manual package is actually included again from RHEL4! I'm not sure there's motivation to reverse this for RHEL3. It does not address your requirement that backported features are versioned appropriately. echo rsync -aqz --cvs-exclude rsync.apache.org::httpd-site/docs-2.0/ /var/www/manual/ > /etc/cron.daily/httpd-manual ?