Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 79538
section name globbing feature request
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:49:00 EDT
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.
So where's the patch?
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.
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.