Re: Why did 'man dpkg' quit working on me?
On Fri, Nov 26, 1999 at 07:58:35AM -0600, Jor-el wrote
> Hi,
>
> I am working on a box which has a standard Slink install. I used
> to be able to pull up the man page of dpkg by doing 'man dpkg'. Yesterday,
> all of a sudden, this command quit working on me, and I cant figure out
> why. The man page was still around - located in /usr/share/man/man8, but
> man wasnt picking it up unless I used the '-M' flag to tell it where it
> was.
>
> I tried rebuilding the man database by doing a 'mandb -c', but
> this didnt solve it either. In the end, I had to end up editing
> /etc/manpath.config and added /usr/share/man to the MANDATORY_MANPATH and
> then rebuilding mandb, before my problem could get solved.
>
> I have two questions : (1) did I solve this the right way? and (2)
> Why did this fail in the first place? Any ideas?
>
Let me answer your questions in reverse:
You don't *really* have a standard Slink install. My guess is that
somewhere along the line, you must have installed a new dpkg. The slink
dpkg has its man pages under /usr/man, which is the convention adopted for
slink; this has chaged for Potato to /usr/share/main, and I'm guessing that
you either installed a 'potato' version of dpkg, or rebuilt a potato release
from source. I could be wrong, it may also be that upgrading to the potato
version of man-db moves your man pages (but then, they all would have
moved).
The way you fixed it is fine if you anticipate running a 'mixed'
installation (some slink, some potato) and won't hurt in any event.
Alternatives would be to downgrade to the Slink version of dpkg (but
some potato packages, e.g. enlightenment, may require a later version),
or to build a 'slinkified' version of the dpkg package, modified to
reflect slink conventions: i.e., use /usr/info, /usr/doc and /usr/man
in place of /usr/share/info, /usr/share/doc and /usr/share/man (not
necessarily a complete list, but they are the changes that spring to
mind).
John P.
--
huiac@camtech.net.au
john@huiac.apana.org.au
"Oh - I - you know - my job is to fear everything." - Bill Gates in Denmark
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