presumably broken package, but with no documentation, who knows?

Binary package hint: zoneminder

I apt-get'ted ZoneMinder, since on the surface, this appears to be a powerful package for webcam surveillance.

However, I was unable to get it to work, or even find out how it is supposed to work, since:

1. There is absolutely no documentation supplied. The file in /usr/share/doc/zoneminder just points to the web site, where the documentation suggests you compile from source yourself. The wiki is apparently makes it impossible to register new users.
2. The only manual pages installed are for a bunch of perl modules. So 'man -k zoneminder' displays exactly none of the supplied executables, and while I can guess at which ones they are (having real descriptive names like zmu, zmc and so forth), it'd be nice if they were at all documented - at least their existence.
3. ...however, as the only output I can get out of them is "abort: <executable> <options>", it probably doesn't matter much anyways.
4. From what's on the web, it appears that ZM is supposed to work through apache, but as far as I can tell, it does not provide any configuration in that respect.

As far as I can tell, this package is broken in just about all possible ways, and Ubuntu would be a better distribution without it.