FS#13734 - Man db missing sections

Attached to Project: Arch Linux
Opened by Lukas Jirkovsky (6xx) - Tuesday, 10 March 2009, 18:27 GMT
Last edited by Andreas Radke (AndyRTR) - Wednesday, 08 April 2009, 21:38 GMT
Task Type Feature Request
Category Packages: Core
Status Closed
Assigned To Andreas Radke (AndyRTR)
Architecture All
Severity Low
Priority Normal
Reported Version
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 2
Private No

Details

man-db miss some sections in its config. In my install there are additionally sections 0p 1p 3p 3x
This task depends upon

Closed by  Andreas Radke (AndyRTR)
Wednesday, 08 April 2009, 21:38 GMT
Reason for closing:  Fixed
Additional comments about closing:  new man-db and man-pages packages in testing for signoff.
Comment by Colin Watson (cjwatson) - Sunday, 15 March 2009, 00:05 GMT
It is not normally necessary to list all sectional extensions in man-db's configuration file; you only need to list those ones which need to be displayed out of order in some way. For example, "... 3 2 3posix ..." would arrange for pages from section 3posix to be displayed after pages from section 2, but any section 3 pages (including 3p, etc.) would be displayed earlier. See manpath(5) which documents this.

Is something actually breaking for you here? If so, what?
Comment by Alessandro Doro (adoroo) - Sunday, 15 March 2009, 03:35 GMT
Two examples.
$ man 3p abs # Ok, abs(3p) is displayed
$ man -a abs # only abs(3) is displayed

"_toupper" is present only in 3p.
$ man _toupper
No manual entry for _toupper

Note:
default man_db.conf
SECTION 1 n l 8 3 2 5 4 9 6 7
Comment by Colin Watson (cjwatson) - Sunday, 15 March 2009, 08:20 GMT
I'd like the output of 'man -ad abs' and 'man -d _toupper', please.
Comment by Alessandro Doro (adoroo) - Sunday, 15 March 2009, 11:46 GMT
Here.
   man_abs.dbg (56.7 KiB)
   man_toupper.dbg (53.4 KiB)
Comment by Colin Watson (cjwatson) - Sunday, 15 March 2009, 12:39 GMT
Ah, I see, Arch's man-pages-posix really does ship pages in /usr/share/man/man3p/. That's pretty odd from my perspective; standard practice on Linux is to install such pages in /usr/share/man/man3/abs.3p.gz instead. I don't know if Arch has a policy on manual page installation locations; I agree that either man-pages-posix (and presumably whatever's shipping 3x) or man-db's configuration needs to be changed here, at least for the time being. I've filed http://bugs.debian.org/519807 to remind me to improve man-db to detect this without the need for special configuration.

Section 0p is not something I've encountered before. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manual_page_(Unix) says that it's for C library header files. I think it probably makes sense to add section 0 immediately after 3, and have done so upstream.
Comment by Alessandro Doro (adoroo) - Sunday, 15 March 2009, 13:10 GMT
No problem finding 3x pages; /usr/share/man/man3x is only a symlink to man3, owned by the package filesystem.

0p, 1p, and 3p pages are included in the man-pages package and come from kernel.org:
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/man-pages/man-pages-posix/man-pages-posix-2003-a.tar.bz2
Comment by Andreas Radke (AndyRTR) - Wednesday, 08 April 2009, 21:38 GMT
new man-pages 3.20 package has a change for the posix pages. these now get moved from man0p/man1p/man3p to usual man0/man1/man3 directory.

for new man-db 2.5.5 package I've added man-db rev. 1051 change to support man0 section. user will have to apply the change from the man_db.conf.pacnew file.

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