retitle 384301 man-db: symlink pages sorted excessively low thanks Sorry I took so long to reply to this bug report.
On Wed, Aug 23, 2006 at 12:51:44PM +0200, Daniel Lublin wrote: > The man program does not seem to honour the order of the directories given > in the manpath. If a man page exists in several directories, they are > displayed in reverse manpath order (in the code, the directory entries are > inserted at the head of a linked list, which is then iterated by starting > at the head). I'm not sure this is an accurate description. Directories are, unless I'm missing something (and I apologise for the state of src/manp.c!) inserted at the tail of a list, not the head. The results of globbing are inserted into an array, and then display candidates are generated from that and added to a linked list. It's true that they're sometimes added to that linked list too early, which I'm fixing at the moment. They are certainly not generally inserted at the head, though. > Is this behaviour intentional, or is the display order just undefined? I > feel that it would be more natural if the manpath order was honoured, the > way the PATH is when finding executables to run. The manpath and PATH are > really kinda related. Normally it is, but ... > Since /usr/local comes first in the PATH (atleast on Debian), I would > expect to see the man page for a locally-installed rtorrent when i do "man > rtorrent", not the one for /usr/bin/rtorrent. But obviously I don't. > > Example: > > ujezd:~> manpath > /usr/local/man:/usr/share/man:/usr/man > > ujezd:~> find /usr/local/man/ /usr/share/man/ | grep rtorr > /usr/local/man/man1/rtorrent.1 > /usr/share/man/man1/rtorrent.1.gz > > ujezd:~> man -w rtorrent > /usr/share/man/man1/rtorrent.1.gz > > ujezd:~> man -a -w rtorrent > /usr/share/man/man1/rtorrent.1.gz > /usr/local/i/rtorrent/svn/share/man/man1/rtorrent.1 What's happening here is actually nothing to do with the manpath. If /usr/local/man/man1/rtorrent.1 were a regular file then you'd find that everything worked as expected. The problem is that symlinks are compared lower than regular files, and this beats manpath ordering; that probably isn't justified, and I'll look into fixing this. Cheers, -- Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
