Two wget man pages listed by whatis

[Brian Beck]

Hello, I don't know if this is a bug or not, but I noticed that when I type at the
console...

$ whatis wget

It returns the following...

Wget (1) - (unknown subject)
wget (1) - The non-interactive network downloader.

I think it should only return the second wget. Typing "man wget" or "man Wget"
produces the same man page.

If there is anything else I can provide please ask.

Thanks.

Package: wget
Version: 1.10-2ubuntu0.1

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

Interesting:

mizar:[~] man -wa wget
/usr/share/man/man1/wget.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/wget.1.gz

I wonder why it turns up twice.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

The 'man -wa' case will be fixed by man-db 2.5.4 (this is http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=496172), but the whatis case is unfortunately separate. I'll add this to my stack of things to look at upstream.

wget could "fix" this by lower-casing its name in the NAME section of its manual page, but I don't think it should have to. This is a bug in man-db.

(Sorry I didn't see this sooner.)

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

I've fixed this upstream, and the fix will be in man-db 2.5.6.

Wed Jul 22 10:48:10 BST 2009 Colin Watson <email address hidden>

        Make whatis/apropos only display any given manual page, or pointers
        to it, once (Ubuntu bug #27113).

        * lib/hashtable.c (hash_lookup_structure): Make external.
        * lib/hashtable.h (hash_lookup_structure): Add prototype.
        * src/whatis.c (get_whatis): Split pointer resolution out to ...
          (resolve_pointers): ... here. Only accept info->pointer == page if
          info->name == page too.
          (display): Use resolve_pointers so that we have the resolved name
          to hand. Only display any given resolved name once.
          (main): Initialise display_seen hash table.
        * docs/NEWS: Document this.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package man-db - 2.5.6-1

---------------
man-db (2.5.6-1) unstable; urgency=low

  * New upstream release:
    - Implement 'man -K', which was the last major remaining missing feature
      when comparing man-db with the man package (closes: #135926, LP:
      #390575).
    - Note that the exact rendering of (e.g.) italic text may vary depending
      on the output device (closes: #516808).
    - Don't create unnecessary database directories (closes: #472919).
    - Explicitly state that -P/$PAGER/$MANPAGER identifies a single command
      with no pipes (closes: #363250).
    - Make whatis/apropos only display any given manual page, or pointers to
      it, once (LP: #27113).
    - Map CP1251 encoding to LESSCHARSET=windows, per less(1) (closes:
      #539690).
    - Loop through semicolon-separated coding tags in the first line of
      manual pages, and convert Emacs coding tags to ones that libiconv
      understands (closes: #496604).
    - Convert text to UTF-8 and then (if necessary) to the target encoding.
      This allows us to distinguish between "text not in input encoding" and
      "characters not representable in output encoding" (closes: #514963).
    - Replace database entries if the mtime of the new data is newer than
      that of the old data, even if the new data represents a symlink rather
      than a regular file (closes: #490582).
    - Increase limit on NAME sections from 2048 bytes to 8192, since some
      pages exceeding the previous limit have been observed in the wild
      (closes: #489907).
    - Cope with some more cases of database corruption (closes: #187750).
    - By default, man will now try to interpret pairs of manual page names
      given on the command line as equivalent to a single manual page name
      containing a hyphen (e.g. 'man foo bar' => foo-bar(1)). This supports
      the common pattern of programs that implement a number of subcommands,
      allowing them to provide manual pages for each that can be accessed
      using similar syntax as would be used to invoke the subcommands
      themselves.
  * Upgrade to debhelper v7.
  * Reverse the direction of the man and mandb symlinks, and migrate any
    statoverrides referring to the old locations in /usr/lib/man-db/.
  * Run cron jobs at idle I/O priority if dpkg 1.15.0 or newer is installed
    (closes: #448400).
  * Policy version 3.8.2: no changes required.

 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Wed, 26 Aug 2009 17:16:19 +0100