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.
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.