ports/113096: [patch] x11/xorg - X.org manpages broken

[Helge Oldach]

Hi Edwin,

edwin at FreeBSD.org:
> Synopsis: [patch] x11/xorg - X.org manpages broken
> 
> State-Changed-From-To: open->closed
> State-Changed-By: edwin
> State-Changed-When: Fri Sep 28 02:32:57 UTC 2007
> State-Changed-Why: 
> This is fixed in the man(1) command in HEAD, RELENG_5 and RELENG_6.
> It will be available in 7.0, 6.3 and 5.6 or when you apply the patch at 
> http://wwwfe.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/gnu/usr.bin/man/man/man.c.diff?r1=1.63;r2=1.65
> 
> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=113096
> 

Not quite. Indeed you've fixed this for the man(1) case. However, as you
know one can also preformat manpages by means of catman(1), for instance
by setting weekly_catman_enable="YES" in periodic.conf.

But catman(1) still does it wrong and generates a blank manpage for
source files that contain a ".so something", which man(1) later simply
displays instead of using the .so directive.

In other words, catman(1) should be fixed with a similar patch to really
fix this bug.

Furthermore, the MLINKS feature creates a set of soft-linked manpages
which catman(1) correctly converts to a *single* catpage file that is
hard-linked, for example:

-rw-r--r--  2 man   wheel   332 Sep 15 22:16 cat3/XtProcessLock.3.gz
-rw-r--r--  2 man   wheel   332 Sep 15 22:16 cat3/XtProcessUnlock.3.gz
-r--r--r--  1 root  wheel  1680 Sep 15 18:10 man3/XtProcessLock.3.gz
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel    18 Sep 15 18:10 man3/XtProcessUnlock.3.gz@ -> XtProcessLock.3.gz

Note that in some cases (particularly with xorg) we have some 20 or 30
soft-linked manpages, which implies significant savings in terms of disk
space and CPU if they all point to a single hard-linked catpage instead
of having an extra file for each manpage with identical contents.

So it appears that the appropriate catman(1) fix that would be slightly
more difficult to emulate the MLINKS behaviour completely by means of
.so directives... MLINKS is not obsolete yet.

Note there is also bin/96540 that fixes a corner case for hard-linked
catpages with catman(1).

Regards,
Helge