no console.4 man page

[aeb]

Binary package hint: manpages

[on my Intrepid machine]

% man 4 console
No manual entry for console in section 4

[elsewhere]
% man 4 console
NAME
       console - console terminal and virtual consoles

DESCRIPTION
       A Linux system has up to 63 virtual consoles (character devices with
       major number 4 and minor number 1 to 63), usually called /dev/ttyn with
...
COLOPHON
       This page is part of release 3.14 of the Linux man-pages project.

A console.4 man page has been in the manpages package since 1994. Several other man pages refer to it:
console_codes.4, console_ioctl.4, tty.4, vcs.4, charsets.7.
Maybe this page was taken from the obsolete-from-the-start console-tools package that is no longer installed?
It belongs to manpages.

[Lars Ljung (larslj)]

I can confirm this for manpages 3.01-1. I should be noted that "apt-file search console.4" reveals that the manpage in included in console-tools and manpages-{cs,dw,es,it,ja,ko,pl,pt,ru}. This is inconsistent.

[aeb (aeb-cwi)]

Still broken in Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS.
The package console-tools has never been the upstream author of console.4, and it is broken and obsolete.
Nobody wants to install it.
The upstream author of console.4 is the manpages package, and it is a bug to explicitly remove a useful page from it, especially since other pages refer to it.

[Matt Fischer (mfisch)]

The manpages package explicitly skips installing the console manpage, although one exists. I am not sure the reason.

[aeb (aeb-cwi)]

Well, the original reason is clear, as Lars Ljung also remarked: there is a console.4 page in the (obsolete) console-tools package, last updated in 1999. Today the absence of console.4 in a standard Ubuntu system is just a bug.

[Stéphane Aulery (lkppo)]

console.4 is not the only page affected by this bug. Soon I will add the list of pages hidden by the patches included in the source package in Debian. I take care to inform the maintainer.