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From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.77 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.19-1t i686) Description of problem: man cannot create cat files in /var/catman because of missing subdirectories. How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. upgrade to the already well known man-1.5i2-0.6x 2. tell man to create "cat" pages by commenting out "NOCACHE" in /etc/man.config 3. man ls 4. ls -la /var/catman --- it is empty 5. as root mkdir /var/catman/cat1 6. man ls 7. ls -la /var/catman/cat1 # ls -la /var/catman/cat1 total 12 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jul 11 16:10 . drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jul 11 16:09 .. -r--r--r-- 1 root root 2700 Jul 11 16:10 ls.1.gz => the man program does not create the needed directories and the man package does not contain the needed directories. Catch 22 Actual Results: The man program can not write the created cat pages because the needed subdirs are missing Expected Results: man should either create the subdirs itself or the man package should contain all necessary subdirectories. Additional info: And yet another bug in the innocent looking yet really evil man-1.5i2 update from Hell. Please, don't ever again tell me that you actually test this stuff. This bug is stupid.
Another related issue is that the "whatis" databases now get updated right in the source man directories, rather than in cache directories. For example... -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 497277 Jul 11 04:09 /usr/man/whatis This is a problem on systems where /usr is mounted read-only. All such variable data should be somewhere under /var, and not within /usr itself.
Fixed in the current erratum