What is the status of `bluez`, and where is the man page?

Question

bluez is advertised as "Official Linux Bluetooth protocol stack". There's a package (several actually) that can be installed:

$ apt-cache search bluez
bluez - Bluetooth tools and daemons
bluez-cups - Bluetooth printer driver for CUPS
bluez-dbg - Bluetooth tools and daemons (with debugging symbols)
bluez-hcidump - Analyses Bluetooth HCI packets
bluez-obexd - bluez obex daemon
bluez-test-scripts - test scripts of bluez
bluez-test-tools - test tools of bluez
bluez-tools - Set of tools to manage Bluetooth devices for linux

What is the status of this package? I ask because after installing the bluez package, I don't find a man page available (there doesn't seem to be a file named bluez on my machine). Does anyone else have one? Does it exist? Where can one get a copy? What is used for documentation?

Answer 1

At the time of writing the latest BlueZ release was v5.50 back in June 2018 whilst v5.43-2 is available in the Stretch repositories. Installing the bluez package should have installed 19 or so man pages along with the usual Debian README.Debian.gz file, you can see the list of files installed by the package on it's page on the Debian Packages site.

You can also view the man pages online at the Debian Manpages site. Unfortunately the btmgmt tool you're interested in does not have a man page but it does offer some built-in help with btmgmt <command> --help.

As you've noted, the documentation in the supplied man pages is quite sparse and (to me, anyway) feels like there's a missing "overview" document somewhere that should be read first. You may have more luck going straight to the "source" and looking through some of the files in the code repository at https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/bluetooth/bluez.git/tree, the "doc" directory contains several text files but from a cursory look they seem to be more about the kernel API than using the userland tools as an end-user.

Answer 2

UPDATE 1: Sep 25, 2020:

• The bluetoothd (aka Bluez) version remains at 5.5 in RPi OS buster

• The date stamp at the bottom of man bluetoothd still has a 2004 date stamp

• The list of Bluetooth-related man pages for buster is here

• The quality of the Bluetooth documentation for RPi still sucks.

That is all.

UPDATE 2: Nov 2, 2020:

Still no improvements on the documentation AFAIK, but I did make some (painful & slow) progress on getting Bluetooth to do something useful on my system - streaming music to a BT speaker.

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Please feel free to edit this answer, or comment if you have better information on the documentation.

Answer 3

Question

What is the status of BlueZ, and where is the man page?

Answer

Yes, I could not find good documentation on BlueZ V5.50 installation.

My disappointing progress report on installing BlueZ V5.50.

I have just found a very detailed guide on how to install BlueZ V5.50 on Rpi's including Rpi4B. I hope to try it soon and then report my progress.

References

(1) Developer Study Guide: Deploying BlueZ v5.50 on Raspberry Pi Board (Including Rpi4B)

(2) Bluetooth Mesh Models Technical Overview