Bug#49962: Old and new man pages - clean solution possible.
On Wed, Mar 29, 2000 at 10:50:07PM +0200, Andreas Krüger wrote:
>
> Closing Bug 49962, Raphael Hertzog <rhertzog@hrnet.fr> writes:
>
> > Everything has been said, and there's no clean
> > solution. It would be a crude hack to make (all or most of
> > the) packages conflict with an old man-db simply because
> > the man page moved.
>
> That'd be a crude hack indeed. But aren't there any smarter
> ways to go about this?
>
> Here is an attempt at a clean solution:
>
> Provide a new package "port-man-db". This package is very
> small, mainly consisting of one single shell - script
> /usr/sbin/port-man-db .
>
> This script checks wether man-db is installed on the system
> at all. If it isn't, the script does nothing. If the
> script finds the old man-db, the neccessary tweaking is done
> to get it to accept new pages. When the script runs a
> second time on an old man-db system, it finds its own
> tweaking in place and does nothing more. If the script
> finds the new man-db, nothing is done, either.
check /usr/lib/man-db/chconfig on potato:
# tool to convert the man-db configuration file to the FHS.
# it slurps the file in argument (default /etc/manpath.config) and,
# it tries to make the changes to comply with FHS.
it is called by postinst:
if [ -x "$(which perl)" -a -x "$chconfig" ]
then $chconfig $conffile
...
You can put this script in an essential package like Guy's debianutils
(like in /usr/lib/debianutils/chconfig ) and run it in postinst.
It is idempotent, so having it also in man-db does no harm.
If you decide to go and NMU debianutils (is Guy still around?) then this
would be the right moment to put undocumented(7) in it, and stop another
series of boring bugs :-)
fab, wearing its hat of man-db maintainer.
PS.: if it was not yet clear, I repeat it here:
you don't need a new "man" program to read FHS pages, just to change the
configfile.
--
| fab@pukki.ntc.nokia.com fpolacco@debian.org
| pgp: 6F7267F5 57 16 C4 ED C9 86 40 7B 1A 69 A1 66 EC FB D2 5E
| fabrizio.polacco@nokia.com gsm: +358 (0)40 707 2468
Reply to: