From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041020 Description of problem: Some examples: # man -k open open: nothing appropriate # man -k screen screen: nothing appropriate # man -k vertical vertical: nothing appropriate # man -k login login: nothing appropriate Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): man-pages-1.67-3 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.man -k <whatever> 2. 3. Actual Results: not results found Expected Results: appropriate results Additional info:
Have you built the 'whatis' databases already? There's a weekly cron job that would do it. Run: sh /etc/cron.weekly/makewhatis.cron Then try again.
So are you saying that this would be more of a bug with some other package? Surely, running this, or something like it, should be part of the man-pages RPM's installation scripts or at the very minimum part of FC3's installation procedure, no? Regards, Mike Klinke
This bug reminds me of bug 1763. ;) This should *not* be done by the man-pages RPM -- it's not the only RPM that contains man pages. It would be more misleading to have incomplete "man -k" output than none at all. The safest approach may be to add a warning to a screen somewhere in firstboot, letting the user know that "man -k" (and probably "locate" too) may not work for a couple of hours.
I forgot to mention in my last comment: makewhatis takes long enough to run (particularly on slow machines) that it's not something I want to stand (or sit) around waiting for at the end of an install, when it can run in the background instead.
Just as a point of reference it took 15 minutes on my 700 MHz Sony Laptop when I ran makewhatis as per Michael's advice above on a system installed with "Everything." There may be something else going on here. I Installed FC3 from FC3 iso's on 16Oct04 at 01:11: -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 66628 Oct 16 01:11 install.log Cron ran the weekly jobs at 05:23, some four hours later: cron.1:Oct 16 05:23:18 linmaster anacron[2990]: Job `cron.weekly' started cron.1:Oct 16 05:23:19 linmaster anacron[23874]: Updated timestamp for job `cron.weekly' to 2004-10-16 cron.1:Oct 16 06:29:32 linmaster anacron[2990]: Job `cron.weekly' terminated It was nearly a week later that I discovered this and posted this bug bug notice on 23Oct04 at 00:28 Additionally, after the weekly script ran last night, 24Oct04, the "man -k" seems to work properly. 08:04:58 # ls cron.weekly/ 0anacron fixfiles.cron makewhatis.cron Regards, Mike Klinke
comment 3: the note about needing to run makewhatis is in the documentation-- I don't think a firstboot warning (especially since it's usually graphic) would be appropriate. I'll consider adding a warning to man that detects if the makewhatis has been run at least once and provide a warning if it hasn't.