Re: man pages: dangling symlinks
On Fri, Oct 04, 2002 at 12:15:02AM -0700, ben wrote:
> On Thursday 03 October 2002 10:19 pm, Colin Watson wrote:
> > On Thu, Oct 03, 2002 at 09:25:00PM -0700, ben wrote:
> > > is there any kind of process by which dangling symlinks can be resolved?
> >
> > Er, that depends. Which ones? Either remove them or get them to point
> > somewhere that exists.
> >
> > Cheers,
>
> hi colin,
>
> thanks for the response. i guess the question should probably be, how do
> dangling symlinks come to occur in the first place?
Bugs in packages, often related to update-alternatives.
> for example:
>
> me@mybox:$ man gconftool
> man: warning: /usr/share/man/man1/gconftool.1.gz is a dangling symlink
> No manual entry for gconftool
>
> should I construe from this that there never was a man page for
> gconftool, or is it the case that it simply failed to install?
I think update-alternatives has failed to decide properly which of the
two possible man pages for gconftool should be used. This could be a
package bug or a bug in u-a itself; it's hard to say.
> in the event that there is a man page for each of the many various
> apps that return this message on man requests, what's the best way to
> fix this?
Does 'update-alternatives --config gconftool' sort it out? Make sure to
keep a record of the current state of the /etc/alternatives/gconftool*
symlinks and the contents of /var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/gconftool before
doing that, so that you have the material with which to file a bug
report.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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