Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 56656
rpmb is producing packages with messed-up man page links
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:38:01 EDT
I have found four different Rawhide packages with man-page links messed up in the same way (the links point at ".gz" instead of "<whatever>.gz") -- nfs-utils, pinfo, ncompress and dump. It seems more likely that there is a bug in rpm which broke all of these man page links, than that all of their spec files and/or install procedures were modified in the same way to cause the same brokenness.
Report against the packages, not rpm. It's up to the package owners to get the bits into the package correctly, not up to rpm.
It irritates me when I file a bug and the owner of the bug assumes that I'm wrong rather than taking the time to check. There is no bug in the other packages about which I filed this bug. The bug is in rpm-build, in particular, in this line in /usr/lib/rpm/brp-compress: l=`ls -l $f | awk '{ print $11 }' | sed -e 's/\.gz$//' -e 's/\.bz2$//' -e 's/\.Z$//'` The output format of "ls" changed recently (perhaps as the result of something related to my locale settings combined with a change in how ls handles various locale settings?), such that $11 is no longer the correct field number for retrieving the file name to which a link points: jik:/tmp!39> ls -l /usr/share/man/man1/zsoelim.1.gz lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 11 10-12 09:55 /usr/share/man/man1/zsoelim.1.gz -> soelim.1.gz Rather than simply changing the script to rely on a different field number, which is prone to work on some systems and not others and which in any case may break again in the future, here's a better fix: --- /usr/lib/rpm/brp-compress Thu Sep 13 17:03:15 2001 +++ /tmp/brp-compress Fri Nov 23 12:18:31 2001 @@ -48,7 +48,7 @@ for f in `find $d -type l` do - l=`ls -l $f | awk '{ print $11 }' | sed -e 's/\.gz$//' -e 's/\.bz2$//' -e 's/\.Z$//'` + l=`ls -l $f | sed -e 's/.* -> //' -e 's/\.gz$//' -e 's/\.bz2$//' -e 's/\.Z$//'` rm -f $f b=`echo $f | sed -e 's/\.gz$//' -e 's/\.bz2$//' -e 's/\.Z$//'` ln -sf $l$COMPRESS_EXT $b$COMPRESS_EXT
It irritates me when a user makes assumptions about my behavior and then presumes to criticize me for problems outside my control. I carry the brp-compress script for the os-devel group. I do not, and can not, change those bits without consensus and approval. Yes the script is feeble and broken. I've known that for quite awhile. And thanks for the patch :-)
I blame it all on jbj. In fact, I am starting to think a good 50 or so XFree86 bugs are actually the result of bugs introduced by RPM. ;o)
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 56336 ***