update-alternatives: bug or misunderstanding?

[Ian Zimmerman <itz@lbin.com>]

man update-alternatives says:

       It is often useful for a number of alternatives to be
       synchronised, so that they are changed as a group; for example,
       when several versions of the vi(1) editor are installed, the
       man page referenced by /usr/man/man1/vi.1 should correspond to
       the executable referenced by /usr/bin/vi.  update-alternatives
       handles this by means of master and slave links; when the
       master is changed, any associated slaves are changed too.  A
       master link and its associated slaves make up a link group.

However, that's not how it seems to work on potato.  I noticed that
after the installation I got /etc/alternatives/awk pointing to
/usr/bin/mawk and /etc/alternatives/awk.1.gz pointing to
/usr/man/man1/mawk.1.gz.  Since I prefer gawk, I did (as root)

update-alternatives --config /usr/bin/awk awk /usr/bin/gawk

That in fact changed the /etc/alternatives/awk link to point to gawk,
but it left the manpage link pointing to mawk.1!  The same thing
happened again when I wanted to change the etags alternative (to point
to the Exuberant version).

I ended up changing the manpage links by hand.  Is that safe or will
it confuse the system even more?

-- 
Ian Zimmerman
Lightbinders, Inc.
2325 3rd Street #324, San Francisco, California 94107