Re: Lintian errors and warnings

[cjw44@flatline.org.uk (Colin Watson)]

Bob Hilliard <hilliard@debian.org> wrote:
>     I have added symlinks from /usr/bin/dictunzip and
>/usr/bin/dictzcat to /usr/bin/dictzip.  The manpage for dictzip
>includes the following:
>
>NAME
>       dictzip, dictunzip, dictzcat - compress (or expand) files,
>       allowing random access
>
>SYNOPSIS
>       dictzip [options] name
>       dictunzip [options] name
>       dictzcat name
>
>     The commands man dictunzip and man dictzcat properly display this
>manpage, but lintian gives the following errors: 
>
>E: dictd: binary-without-manpage dictunzip
>E: dictd: binary-without-manpage dictzcat
>
>     The gzip package has a similar situation with gunzip and zcat,
>but it has created gunzip.1 and zcat.1 as hardlinks to gzip.1.  Since
>man can deal with a manpage with multiple names, this seems like an
>unnecessary complication.

Please install dictunzip.1 and dictzcat.1 as symlinks or hardlinks. If
you don't, man has to decompress substantial parts of /usr/share/man
looking for your man page (if catman hasn't run recently, which it might
not have done), which is horrendously inefficient and probably the most
common complaint I hear about man.

man may stop supporting this in the future, precisely because it
unavoidably causes such a usability problem immediately after you've
installed some new man pages which it has to search. I should really
find out how many packages behave in this way and get policy clarified
on this point.

-- 
Colin Watson                                     [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]