Re: Bug#8106: `undocumented' manpage
Santiago Vila Doncel <sanvila@unex.es> writes:
>
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>
> On Sun, 16 Mar 1997, Ben Pfaff wrote:
>
> > Package: manpages
> > Version: 1.15-1
> >
> > There needs to be an uncompressed version of the `undocumented'
> > manpage, in /usr/man/man7/undocumented.7. When `man-db' regenerates
> > the database, a whole slew of messages like this appear:
> >
> > [ ... ]
>
> All you see here are bugs in other packages, not in manpages.
>
> Policy says to link to undocumented.7.gz. And this is a Debian
> issue, so we do not need to maintain any compatibility.
Back in the mists of time, I recall a discussion of this, and I
thought that the decision was to used undocumented.7. IIRC, the
reasoning behind this was that the compressed version would need to be
decompressed and cached for each page, thus taking time and a small
amount of disk space. Have I got this wrong?
This does appear to have changed recently though as my (stable) system
has /usr/man/man7/undocumented.7 and not /usr/man/man7/undocumented.7.gz
You are however correct in asserting that policy states to make a link
to undocumented.7.gz. Can you tell me why it was decided to switch (or
even better point me at the discussion).
>
> > Admittedly, packages should eventually be modified to refer to the one
> > with `.gz', but I'm tired of all these messages every time that man-db
> > decides it's time to rebuild the database.
>
> Please, submit bug reports against those packages.
>
> IMHO, this is not a bug in manpages. If we would add that link to
> manpages, this dangling symlinks would not be ever discovered.
>
Chris
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