catman doesn't generate cat pages for section 1 when p7zip is installed

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement]

Binary package hint: man-db

This is more a symptom of a bug than the cause, the cat pages for section 1 are not generated (or rather written to disk) when p7zip is installed

On my system only 404main.1.gz and 411toppm.1.gz are in /var/cache/man/cat1/ after running catman.

TEST CASE:
1. sudo apt-get install p7zip
2. sudo rm /var/cache/man/cat*/*
3. sudo LC_ALL=C catman 1
4. ls /var/cache/man/cat1/
5. Verify that the list contains a few hundreds files with the extension .1.gz

If p7zip is already install then run the following preliminary steps before running the test case:
1. sudo apt-get remove --purge p7zip
2. sudo mandb
3. sudo rm /var/cache/man/cat*/*
4. sudo LC_ALL=C catman 1
5. ls /var/cache/man/cat1/
6. Verify that the list contains a few hundreds files with the extension .1.gz

It seems that catman is using 7zr (which is installed with p7zip) as the name of the section for the packages in section coming after 7zr in alphabetical order.

Reproduced in Karmic to Natty
Hardy doesn't seems to be affected

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04
Package: man-db 2.5.7-6
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.36-0.4-generic 2.6.36-rc7
Uname: Linux 2.6.36-0-generic i686
Architecture: i386
Date: Thu Oct 21 00:08:42 2010
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: man-db

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

Output of LC_ALL=C catman 1

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

Output of LC_ALL=C catman -d 1

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Thanks for your report. I've fixed this upstream, and the fix will be in man-db 2.5.8.

Wed Nov 3 20:27:46 GMT 2010 Colin Watson <email address hidden>

        * src/catman.c (parse_for_sec): Explicitly pass -S before section
          number, to reduce ambiguity.
        * src/man.c (main): In catman mode, never try to guess whether a
          page argument is a section, as it's too easy to get this wrong
          (Ubuntu bug #664211).

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package man-db - 2.5.8-1

---------------
man-db (2.5.8-1) experimental; urgency=low

  * New upstream release:
    - Explicitly set groff's hyphenation language, to ensure that it only
      hyphenates languages it knows about (closes: #570247).
    - Add support for XZ-compressed manual pages, thanks to Darren Salt
      (closes: #572233).
    - Try underscore-separated subpages as well as hyphen-separated ones,
      thanks to Tanguy Ortolo (closes: #574641).
    - Build libman and libmandb as shared libraries, considerably reducing
      executable size.
    - Warnings about unrecognised locales are now suppressed if the
      DPKG_RUNNING_VERSION environment variable is set (i.e. man-db is
      running within a Debian package's maintainer script), since the system
      locales are often out of sync with the C library in that context.
      Thanks to the Debian Perl maintainers for the idea.
    - In catman mode, never try to guess whether a page argument is a
      section, as it's too easy to get this wrong (LP: #664211).
    - mandb should no longer repeatedly rescan manual page hierarchies when
      a whatis entry turns into a broken link.
  * Use a separate build directory, eliminating the requirement to preserve
    some files by hand.
  * Build with external libpipeline.
 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Tue, 16 Nov 2010 10:13:59 +0000