Date: Sun, 16 Aug 2015 21:14:51 -0700
From: Isaac Dunham <ibid.ag@gmail.com>
To: alpine-aports@lists.alpinelinux.org
Subject: [alpine-aports] Bugs in man and manpages
Message-ID: <20150817041450.GD2568@newbook>
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Hello all,
I've run into some issues related to manpages.

1- dangling links to manpages
 I encountered some dangling links in dosfstools-doc, which pointed to
the original, uncompressed, manpages.
Apparently there's a bug in the abuild manpage compression code (lines
1410-1413). While abuild does find and compress the actual manpages,
all the symlinks to the manpages never get updated.

2- translated manpages never get compressed.
A bug in the same code.

Roughly, a fix for these issues could look like this:

	find "$subpkgdir"/usr/share/man/man[1-9]* \
		"$subpkgdir"/usr/share/man/*/man[1-9]* \
		-type f \! -name \*.gz \! -name \*.bz2 2>/dev/null |
		xargs -r gzip -9
	find "$subpkgdir"/usr/share/man/man[1-9]* \
		"$subpkgdir"/usr/share/man/*/man[1-9]* \
		-type l \! -name \*.gz \! -name \*.bz2 2>/dev/null | {
		while read MAN; do
			case "$MAN" in
			(*.gz|*.bz2);;
			(*.[0-9]*)
			ln -s `readlink "$MAN"`.gz "$MAN".gz
			rm "$MAN"
			;;
			esac
			done
		}

Finally, there's an annoyance I have with mdocml.
It's impossible to specify the POSIX manpage if another manpage for the same command/function is installed in the same numeric section.
On Debian, you can have the manpages:
/usr/share/man/man1/ls.1
/usr/share/man/man1/ls.1posix

installed at the same time, and get the POSIX manpage via:
man 1p ls

On Alpine, this fails; the root cause seems to be that if you specify a
section, mdocml insists on looking in
"/usr/share/man/man$SECTION/$COMMAND.$SECTION"


If you have both the Linux and POSIX manpages installed (which I always do),
"man 3 fprintf" gives you the Linux manpage, as would be expected.
But "man 3p fprintf" says "man: No entry for fprintf in the manual."
When I run
 ln -s man3 /usr/share/man/man3p
  man 3p fprintf
I end up getting the Linux manpage, which suggests that there *is* fuzzy matching code, but the logic is backwards.

Thanks,
Isaac Dunham


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