Re: Attn gawk and man-db maintainers: 3am pages shadowing 3p

[Achim Gratz <Stromeko at nexgo dot de>]

Corinna Vinschen writes:
> On Oct 22 12:03, Warren Young wrote:
>> Several gawk module manual pages (fnmatch, fork, readdir, and
>> time(3am)) currently shadow pages of the same name in section 3p,
>> owned by man-pages-posix.  These are currently dumped into the generic
>> man3 directory, which causes them to take precedence over 3p because
>> of this line in /etc/man_db.conf:
>> 
>>   SECTION     1 1p 8 2 3 3p 4 5 6 7 9 0p n
>> 
>> This causes âman readdirâ to return the gawk page, not the POSIX page,
>> as the user almost certainly intended.
>> 
>> To fix this, the man_db maintainer should add a 3am after 3p here, and
>> the gawk maintainer should install the pages into the man3am
>> directory.
>> 
>> Alternately, 3p could move in front of 3, since itâs more specific.
>> (You could say that man3p subclasses man3.)
>
> Yaakov, how do we go about that?  I'm open to all suggestions, including
> dropping gawk and man-db from the distro ;)

I suggest looking at some Linux packages  You'll find that there are a
bunch of patches that a) make the SECTION setup considerably more
complex than the one shown above and b) add an (optional) prompt that
tells you when a manpage exists in multiple sections and allows you to
chose something other than the first in search order (which is what man
on Cygwin shows unless you give the additional option to show _all_
manpages matching the query, which can be too many).

(*)
https://build.opensuse.org/package/show?project=openSUSE%3AFactory&package=man


Regards,
Achim.
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