Following a clean "install everything" installation of Red Hat Linux 6.1, try this: # rpm -qa | grep howto howto-6.1-1 howto-chinese-6.1-1 howto-croatian-6.1-1 howto-french-6.1-1 howto-german-6.1-1 howto-greek-6.1-1 howto-html-6.1-1 howto-indonesian-6.1-1 howto-italian-6.1-1 howto-japanese-6.1-1 howto-korean-6.1-1 howto-polish-6.1-1 howto-russian-6.1-1 howto-serbian-6.1-1 howto-sgml-6.1-1 howto-slovenian-6.1-1 howto-spanish-6.1-1 howto-swedish-6.1-1 howto-turkish-6.1-1 Now try: # rpm -ql howto-french /usr/doc/HOWTO /usr/doc/HOWTO/translations /usr/doc/HOWTO/translations/fr /usr/doc/HOWTO/translations/fr/3Dfx-HOWTO /usr/doc/HOWTO/translations/fr/Access-HOWTO /usr/doc/HOWTO/translations/fr/Alpha-HOWTO /usr/doc/HOWTO/translations/fr/Assembly-HOWTO /usr/doc/HOWTO/translations/fr/Benchmarking-HOWTO ... [snip] ... Now try: # ls -l /usr/doc/HOWTO/translations ls: /usr/doc/HOWTO/translations: No such file or directory All attempts to (re)install the foreign language HOWTO from the RPMs on the RHL 6.1 CD-ROM fail -- rpm -Uvh or rpm -ivh report that the packages are already installed. rpm -e marks them as uninstalled, but a fresh attempt to install them looks like this example: # rpm -e howto-french # rpm -ivvh howto-french-6.1-1.noarch.rpm D: counting packages to install D: found 1 packages D: looking for packages to download D: retrieved 0 packages D: New Header signature D: Signature size: 149 D: Signature pad : 3 D: sigsize : 152 D: Header + Archive: 10036496 D: expected size : 10036496 D: opening database mode 0x42 in //var/lib/rpm/ D: found 0 source and 1 binary packages D: installing binary packages D: getting list of mounted filesystems D: New Header signature D: Signature size: 149 D: Signature pad : 3 D: sigsize : 152 D: Header + Archive: 10036496 D: expected size : 10036496 D: package: howto-french-6.1-1 files test = 0 D: file: /usr/doc/HOWTO action: skipnstate D: file: /usr/doc/HOWTO/translations action: skipnstate D: file: /usr/doc/HOWTO/translations/fr action: skipnstate D: file: /usr/doc/HOWTO/translations/fr/3Dfx-HOWTO action: skipnstate D: file: /usr/doc/HOWTO/translations/fr/Access-HOWTO action: skipnstate D: file: /usr/doc/HOWTO/translations/fr/Alpha-HOWTO action: skipnstate ... [snip] ... ... and after the dust settles, none of the files have been installed, although the RPM database has been updated and rpm will once again report that the package has been installed. The same thing happens with any of the other foreign language HOWTO RPMs. Am I missing something obvious, or are these RPMs uninstallable?
LANG needs to be set to fr_FR before those files get dumped on the hard drive. Those files are tagged as being usefull only for LANG=fr_FR setups.
Sounds like you need a HOWTO on the subject of how to install HOWTOs :-) Seriously, how is anyone supposed to be able to figure this out, especially if they don't have the documentation? It seems like a bad idea to place obstacles, particularly undocumented obstacles, in the way of installing (of all things) documentation! In a multilingual environment, one of the attractive features of Linux is that reasonably decent documentation is available in languages other than English. I would guess that this was probably done so that folks who do "everything" installs don't get their disks unnecessarily cluttered with many megabytes of files they may never use. The '--force' option of rpm, however, *should* override requirements such as LANG=... (but this is not the case), and the the '-vv' option *should* result in a display of exactly what condition was not satisfied (but it doesn't). Perhaps rpm -vv can emit a diagnostic: Package 'foo' cannot be installed unless you set the value of environment variable 'BAR' to 'blurfl'