How to install man-pages into Binder image?

Binder
#1

I would like to install the man-pages into my image. Having the man-pages available is very useful for teaching Bash course which is something that I do frequently as a Software Carpentry instructor.

I can not quite find the right combination of packages to make this work. Currently my apt.txt looks as follows.

apt-utils
manpages
man-db

Here is the link to the main repo for my course.

Any ideas?

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#2

From this issue it looks like ubuntu docker images explicitly disable manpage setup, which makes sense I suppose since docker images aren’t typically used interactively. Since repo2docker is meant for creating interactive environments, we could revert this switch in our base environment setup:

RUN rm /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/excludes

and then manpages ought to work if the necessary packages are installed.

EDIT: worth noting that due to the way this filters out manpages at install time, I don’t see a easy way for a given repo to work around the limitation with e.g. a postBuild script.

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#3

Further down the thread you linked was another solution using unminimize.

FROM ubuntu:18.10

RUN yes | unminimize && \
    apt-get install -y man-db && \
    rm -r /var/lib/apt/lists/*

Perhaps this would also work?

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