[Bug 226731] man command ignores trailing versioning info

[bugzilla-noreply at freebsd.org]

https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=226731

            Bug ID: 226731
           Summary: man command ignores trailing versioning info
           Product: Base System
           Version: 10.3-RELEASE
          Hardware: Any
                OS: Any
            Status: New
          Severity: Affects Some People
          Priority: ---
         Component: bin
          Assignee: freebsd-bugs at FreeBSD.org
          Reporter: freebsd at dreamchaser.org

The man command ignores trailing versioning information:

ls /usr/local/man/man1/autoconf*
autoconf-2.69.1.gz

$ man autoconf
No manual entry for autoconf
$ man autoconf-2
No manual entry for autoconf-2
$ man autoconf-2.69              (works)

This forces a user to do directory searches along manpath to find the proper
name to use to get the man command to work.  There are a number of man pages
with this problem, primarily in the man(1) section:

/usr/local/man$ find . -print | grep -e "[a-z]*-[-,0-9\.]*.[1-9].gz" | wc
      36      36    1009

If man fails to find a match, it would be helpful if it did something
like the following:
  Inform the user, as it does now.
  Find all man pages which match the pattern (I may have this wrong...):
    <original-name-given>-[-,0-9,\.]*.[1-9].gz
  Inform the user of these results
  Do zero or more of the following:
    Ask the user to enter a new name based on the search results
    If only one result, ask the user if that's what they wanted
      Don't just deliver this unannounced, as it might not be the
      desired page, and would make the single result scroll off the
      top (it would likely be skipped by a user scanning the output
      anyway, unless hilighted in color.)

If the man command remains unchanged, then the install process for ports 
should disallow the installation of man pages with versioning information,
or at least produce warnings.  The make.conf entry "DEVELOPER=yes" should
cause this to be checked.  In terms of port checking for developers, 
warnings should also be produced for man pages with major version numbers
on the end as well, such as perl5.  A naive user might be frustrated 
when typing "man perl" if nothing appears.

Some ports such as gimp and valac provide symlinks to solve the problem;
others, like autoconf, are particular problems.

If man is not changed, bugs should be filed against at least the following
ports (I don't have all that many installed, so I have no idea what the
extent of the problem is):
  autoconf
  automake
  aclocal (xorg-macros?)
  gtk3    (gtk-query-immodules-3.0.1.gz)
  gstreamer
  gimp    (gimptool-2.0.1.gz)
  vala    (vapigen-0.36.1.gz)

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are the assignee for the bug.