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I want to install man in MSYS2 so I tried both pacman -Ss man and pacman -Fs man (as per this question), as well a couple of others like pacman -Fs /usr/bin/man but they don't seem to give me an answer:

  • pacman -Ss man returns a lot of unrelated results.
  • pacman -Fs man finds msys/bash-completion 2.8-2 and msys/xmlto 0.0.28-1 which doesn't seem correct.

Still, when I do this:

$ pacman -S man
resolving dependencies...
looking for conflicting packages...

Packages (5) gdbm-1.16-1  groff-1.22.3-1  libgdbm-1.16-1  libpipeline-1.5.0-1  man-db-2.8.3-2

Total Download Size:    2.90 MiB
Total Installed Size:  15.72 MiB

:: Proceed with installation? [Y/n]

It seems correct – I think that man is inside the man-db-2.8.3-2 package. How does this work? Are there "search" commands that would find man before invoking the "sync" command?

(Note: while I'm in MSYS2 on Windows, I think the question is purely about Pacman and therefore valid on this site. I hope...)

Borek Bernard
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1 Answers1

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From the pacman manpage, for -S:

Packages that provide other packages are also handled. For example, pacman -S foo will first look for a foo package. If foo is not found, packages that provide the same functionality as foo will be searched for. If any package is found, it will be installed. A selection prompt is provided if multiple packages providing foo are found.

And from the package information for man-db:

Provides: man

If pacman -Fs didn't find the man in man-db, try syncing the files database first (pacman -Fy), or use pkgfile.

muru
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  • Thanks, despite `pacman -Fy`, `pacman -Fs` doesn't find it. Might be something about MSYS2 in the end? Thanks for the response. – Borek Bernard Jul 06 '18 at 07:13
  • @BorekBernard on an Arch Linux system, `man-db` was the second result (the first being `core/filesystem`, which probably is a higher priority package), so I'd agree that it seems to be an MSYS-side issue. – muru Jul 06 '18 at 07:55
  • I logged it here: https://github.com/Alexpux/MSYS2-packages/issues/1332 – Borek Bernard Jul 06 '18 at 08:30
  • BTW, is there a way to search that "Provides:" field that you mentioned? – Borek Bernard Jul 06 '18 at 09:24