man pages not showing up for commands affected by update-alternatives

[Peter Matulis]

The update-alternatives system uses symlinks to find man pages. With 'netcat', for instance:

/etc/alternatives/nc.1.gz -> /usr/share/man/man1/nc_openbsd.1.gz

This needs to be taken account of. Right now, manpages.ubuntu.com only shows results for 6.06 for 'nc' or 'netcat'.

[Dustin Kirkland  (kirkland)]

Confirming, marking wishlist.

This is really hard to solve, as these symlinks are installed at postinst.

The manpage repository generator basically just untars the .deb archive.

$ cat debian/netcat-openbsd.postinst
if [ "$1" = "configure" ]; then
    update-alternatives \
        --install /bin/nc nc /bin/nc.openbsd 50 \
        --slave /bin/netcat netcat /bin/nc.openbsd \
        --slave /usr/share/man/man1/nc.1.gz nc.1.gz \
                /usr/share/man/man1/nc_openbsd.1.gz \
        --slave /usr/share/man/man1/netcat.1.gz netcat.1.gz \
                /usr/share/man/man1/nc_openbsd.1.gz
fi

I don't know the best way to solve this. I'm open to suggestions and patches ...

[Lyn Perrine (walterorlin)]

I think the easest way to work around this if you have the package installed would be to run namei `which $symlinkcommand` and then open the man page for that. Even if someone implements this how would this be maintainable? Also can't symlinks be manually set with update alternatives. namei `which ` on the client machien seems the only sane solution I can think of right now but again this varies for each machine so how would this be implemented well.