tcl cannot see manpage in tclsh

Question

I've just installed Tcl/Tk 8.5.11 on my Ubuntu 12.04.3 64bit. I installed with the following two commands:

%sudo apt-get install tcl

%sudo apt-get install tk

Now I can use tclsh and almost everything is fine. The only problem is that I cannot visit manpages in tclsh by using "man <command_name>" command.

Actually, if the command has a corresponding one in bash, such as "lsearch", the man command will display the linux manpage for the command. When it comes to a command that is only available in tcl, such as "lappend", the "man lappend" command will return:

%man lappend

No manual entry for lappend

child process exited abnormally

I guess this is due to missing of some procedures during installation. Anyone can help me?

Answer 1

The manpages are in the tcl8.5-doc and tk8.5-doc packages. This is the usual convention on Debian-based systems, Ubuntu included, that the documentation packages has the same name as their base packages, plus the -doc suffix, and developer packages use the -dev suffix.

Also note that Tcl and Tk, as packaged for Debian (and pulled by Ubuntu), have virtual packages, which are provided by physical packages matching the default version of Tcl and Tk in a given distribution. These packages are tcl, tk, tcl-doc and tcl-dev. You can install them and be sure the next distro upgrade will pull in the next default versions of Tcl and Tk, when it's time. Currently the default version is 8.5 but it supposedly will be 8.6 in a year or so.

For the future, you are perfectly able to answer questions like this all by yourself using the package searching site — navigate to the "Search the contents of packages" block towards the end of the page, enter lappend into the input box, select i386 or amd64 as your architecture and tick the "packages that contain files whose names contain the keyword" option, then click the search button.