Bug#1290: dpkg 0.93-70 leaves catman confusion

[mitchell@mdd.comm.mot.com (Bill Mitchell)]

PACKAGE: dpkg and/or man
VERSION dpkg:0.93-70, man:2.3.10-1

Currently, the cpio package and mt-st package both provide
/usr/bin/mt and /usr/man/man1/mt.1.  Also, they don't currently
declare a conflict with one another.  I noted confusion after the
following command sequence:

    dpkg --install cpio.deb
    man mt
    dpkg --install mt-st.deb
    man mt

I was shown the mt man page from cpio, not the one from mt-st which I
had expected

The mt man page from cpio was still present in /var/catman/cat1/mt.1.gz.
That's what I was seeing, even though /usr/man/man1 contained mt.1
istalled from the mt-st package.

I note that the last-modified time of /usr/catman/cat1/mt.1.gz is
the time it was installed, while the last modified time of
/usr/man/man1/mt.1 is apparently the last-modified time of
that file as installed from the package.

I tried touching /usr/man/man1/mt.1, and then saying "man dpkg",
but that didn't get the catman file rebuilt.

Two possible solutions:

1.  dpkg cleans up /var/catman when removing packages.

2.  dpkg touches /usr/man files from packages when installing them
    and man rebuilds /var/catman files if they're outdated relative
    to the corresponding /usr/man files.

I favor solution 1, but believe that the man(1) program should also
implement its part of solution 2.