Bug 79538 - section name globbing feature request
Summary: section name globbing feature request
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED DEFERRED
Alias: None
Product: Red Hat Linux
Classification: Retired
Component: man
Version: 8.0
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
medium
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Eido Inoue
QA Contact: Ben Levenson
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2002-12-12 21:14 UTC by Mike Snitzer
Modified: 2007-04-18 16:49 UTC (History)
0 users

Fixed In Version:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2004-08-23 20:56:26 UTC
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)

Description Mike Snitzer 2002-12-12 21:14:04 UTC
From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020827

Description of problem:
I was just flirting with having mpich, mpich-gm, lam (all of which have the same
man page names) deposit their man pages with names like:
/usr/share/man/man1/mpirun.1mpich-1_2_4.gz .. but in order to make use of such a
section (man -S 1mpich-1_2_4 mpirun) I'd need section name globbing support;
turns out RedHat's man package doesn't support section globbing... SO I wrote a
spec file for debian's man-db and ported that to play nicely with RH.. so I got
myself section name globbing capability; but in the end I was left with a
non-standard man package that I'd have to maintain.

Section name globbing would be a useful feature; but I'll let others decide if
such a feature is worth the effort.  One thing is clear; RedHat's man lacks
modern features found in other distros (section name globbing is just one of
them =).

For now the man pages for the mpi libraries will reside in a non-standard MANPATH.



Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):


How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. from within the same $major_man_section (i.e. /usr/share/man/man1) create
some $test_manpage with a $variable section name; have the $test_manpage's
basename be named the same as an already existing manpage
2. try to access said $test_manpage with: man -S $variable $test_manpage
3. the $PAGER may or may not display the desired $test_manpage; it may just
display the manpage that is named similarly in the $major_man_section
	

Actual Results:  The same manpage is displayed everytime regardless of the
MANSECT env. variable or the use of -S flag. The reason for this RedHat's man
doesn't support searching for a specific variable length/named man section; the
most it'll support is GNU style: man 3x foo (which is /usr/share/man/man3/foo.3x.gz)

Expected Results:  Desired result would be to have man pull up the manpage
within the specified section in a deterministic way.  

Additional info:  I'm sure patches would be graciously accepted but I can't
dedicate time to this.

Comment 1 Eido Inoue 2003-01-02 16:42:03 UTC
So where's the patch?

Comment 2 Mike Snitzer 2003-01-02 18:47:59 UTC
Please see the "Additional Info" of the original feature request.  At one point,
the redhat man codebase was seemingly derived from the same codebase that debian
uses for man-db.  As for why a fork occured I have no idea; but I'd suggest
embracing Debian's man-db codebase that is being actively maintained.

Comment 3 Eido Inoue 2004-08-23 20:56:26 UTC
we have to keep the fork for now due to i18n and customer-driven
requests. i don't see a quick and easy way to put this in. the desired
behavior can be had with some iterative bash loop code around the man
request. not ideal or intuitive, granted, but a workaround nevertheless.


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