Description of problem: puppet needs dependency on rdoc so --help works Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 0.23.0 / FC-6 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. on a clean Xen instance 2. yum install puppet 3. puppet --help Actual results: [root@dhcp231-76 ~]# puppet --help No help available unless you have RDoc::usage installed Expected results: shows help Additional info: N/A
The reason that that dependency doesn't exist is that installation of the puppet client shouldn't cause the usually unnecessary install of rdoc. The real fix is to have man pages for puppet (see http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/ticket/198)
I filed that one way back :) If that one is being worked on, great. Typically I have rdoc installed during development though I hit that on one of our guests.
David, Many thanks for the puppet packages, they're fantastically handy. However, even when puppet adds manpages, using the --help option should print something useful instead of the current "No help available unless you have RDoc::usage installed." The ruby-rdoc package is less than a megabyte installed (~1.7MB total, with the ruby-irb package that it pulls in). This hardly seems too large to require. The benefit to (new) users of the puppet packages far outweighs the desire to have absolutely minimal dependencies IMHO. Please re-consider requiring ruby-rdoc to provide a better user experience. FWIW, the upstream bug has been marked as closed, fixed (though it did not make it into the 0.24.2 tarball -- the Rakefile needs an update). Further, the only man page created is for the puppet command. There are yet to be man pages for puppetca, puppetd, or puppetmasterd.
*** Bug 432193 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Hi Todd, I patched the manpages into the 0.24.4 release, that includes puppetca, puppetd, and puppetmasterd. Seeing how all of ruby is only ~ 7.1MB, rdoc is a pretty serious addition. I will not add a dependency on rdoc, since it will unnecessarily bloat things for people that don't need it and/or install with --excludedocs. I agree that that message isn't very helpful; it should be filed as a separate bug upstream (and ideally, puppet would produce at least some brief help message when run on a non-rdoc system)