On Sun, Nov 09, 2003 at 05:41:02PM +0000, Matthew Wilcox wrote: > On Fri, Nov 07, 2003 at 10:44:34PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: > > There may actually be a problem with installing alternatives to > > manpages. > > > > See <URL: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=218630 >. > > > > I don't know what to do about this yet. > > I don't understand the problem ;-) > > Why does man choose to display x-terminal-emulator(1) when I > ask it for xterm? It happens on my system (and I also have > x-terminal-emulator pointing to uxterm). From an strace, I see > man opening /var/cache/man/index.db and then choosing to open > /usr/share/man/man1/x-terminal-emulator.1.gz > > But according to man(1), specifying -u should cause this database to be > updated if it no longer represents the filesystem. This doesn't help > though (man xterm still brings up x-terminal-emulator). I'm confused. > > In any event, I can't produce an analagous problem with lwm/twm. > man lwm brings up the lwm(1x) manapge, man twm brings up the twm(1x) > manpage and man x-window-manager brings up lwm(1x). update-alternatives > does the correct thing (lwm and twm still come up appropriately and > x-window-manager now brings up twm(1x)). > > It almost looks as if man has some special knowledge that xterm really > should mean x-terminal-emulator, which is quite ridiculous. Is there > perhaps some configuration or manpage directive I've overlooked?
No, I shouldn't think so. Something has gone stupid in man's database or its handling of that database, I think, which is very likely a bug. Indeed, I don't think it should be touching the database at all here. Could somebody who can reproduce this bug (not me at the moment) please (a) run 'man -d xterm' and (b) run 'accessdb | egrep "(xterm|x-terminal-emulator)"'? Thanks. This is also bug #204249, which I unfortunately hadn't had time to look at until now, so I'm extending the already long Cc: list to include that. Cheers, -- Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
