coreutils 'info command' broken

[A. Eibach]

Try the following on Ubuntu (or one of its flavors) and tell me what you see:

$ info coreutils 'cat invocation'

Should give you the *detailed* cat manual. However, you will in fact land on "2.14 'coreutils' Multi-call binary" in the documentation. Now idea yet how to fix this.

Great job. Seems the bug they reported on Debian mailing list on 9/11 (2014)

https://<email address hidden>/msg1256146.html

... has now made its way into the Ubuntu version of coreutils as well.

By the way, isn't that a great comment again??

"though downstream 8.23 could be tweaked to avoid this issue."

Cool. They've broken something that worked perfectly _for years_ and all the user gets is "yeah, 8.23 'could be tweaked'". If only he had said _how_ to tweak it!! But apparently the commenter was way too lazy to write one more line.

[C de-Avillez (hggdh2)]

Thank you for opening this bug and helping make Ubuntu, and free software, better.

The Debian bug I linked to has more information, and is the core bug for this issue. Right now, for Ubuntu (and Debian) 'info <coreutils command>" will work, and can be used as a bypass.

I am not sure how to interpret the rest of your comments, so I will refrain from doing so.

[A. Eibach (andi3)]

Your bypass did not work at all, but thanks to the debbug entry you linked, I got two working variants now:

(fully compatible, anywhere)

$ info '(coreutils) cat invocation'

(note: might not work everywhere)

$ info Coreutils 'cat invocation'

[A. Eibach (andi3)]

OK, this one-liner has to do the trick for me, until this is fixed downstream:

#!/bin/bash
[[ $1 == "" ]] || info Coreutils "$1 invocation"

Wish this could be made an alias, but this is impossible since the variable is _inside_ instead of at EOL

[Pádraig Brady (p-draigbrady)]

Downstream debian 8.23 package could rename the coreutils node to avoid that issue.

[A. Eibach (andi3)]

Nice ... just wondering if this "fix" wouldn't have to be rolled back again soon since roughly 100 tools have been recompiled after the recent change(s)?