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Comment by stock_toaster | Hacker News Reader

If you always want docs, you just install the `docs` meta package that will pull in any `*-doc` package for anything else you install.

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It works similarly in i.e. Debian, so it's not really a quirk of Alpine.

Can you elaborate on what you mean here? I’ve never seen a Debian install packages without docs in 20 years. What have I been doing right/wrong?

If you use a `-slim` debian docker image variant, it won't have the manpages (or most locales, and apt will be stripped down, etc, etc).

I think you can achieve the same thing on bare metal by being careful to tell it not to install a bunch of base package sets.

Alpine is more container-focused than debian, so I imagine they default to something closer to `-slim`, but I haven't tried installing it on bare metal or in a VM.

The "manpages" and any "locale" packages are neither required nor important so are not included in a Debian minbase install. If you want them, you can install them easily with apt.

I'm not sure what you mean by apt being stripped down. You get the normal apt still.

On Debian some packages come with the manual, but have the info-pages as a *-doc (like coreutils), some packages come with basic manual and have extra ones on the doc package (like linux-image), some packages have no documentation at all on the main package (AFAIK nothing on the minimal installation), and some packages bundle everything.

And *-doc packages are not required for their main counterparts.

Thanks, that's exactly what I needed!

This was going to be my inquiry, thanks!

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