Re: Conflicting alias for some man pages

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Hi Helge,

On 12/10/22 08:53, Helge Kreutzmann wrote:
Hello Branden,
On Fri, Dec 09, 2022 at 02:37:19PM -0600, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
At 2022-12-09T19:53:44+0100, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
Could you remove these duplicates in your next upload?

I found the following duplicates, I did not do an extensive search:
===================================================================
rindex - Both in index.3 and in string.3
strncasecmp - Both in strcasecmp.3 and in string.3
strncat - Both in strcat.3 and in string.3
strncmp - Both in strcmp.3 and in string.3
strncpy - Both in strcpy.3 and in string.3
__fpurge - Both in fpurge.3 and in stdio_ext.3
strcspn - Both in strspn.3 and in string.3
strrchr - Both in strchr.3 and in string.3
pselect - Both in select.2 and in select_tut.2

Could you please confirm if this is a bug in the Linux man-pages, or is it
something desirable?

I don't think it is a bug for multiple pages to have a mandb entry for
the same name.  The man(1) librarian is designed in expectation of that;
we have both printf(1) and printf(3), after all.

Ok. The rationale for my request was that the for *localized* system
this does not work in Debian (reliably). It only works if the english
man page is not present, otherwise you get the english version.

For example, for strcasecmp I currently get the german version,
however, for strncasecmp I get the english version.

I reported this to the man-db package in Debian and was told that
this is a bug in manpages-l10n and that I should create symlinks.

See https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1020742 for
details.

While doing so, I noticed this problem, because how should I decide if
strncat.3 should point to strcat.3 or string.3? Especially
automatically, because manpages-l10n has a dozen or so languuages with
many thousand man pages.

Currently, the link is set randomly.


I find it a bit weird that we need to specify a NAME only once.

There is no such need, and it would be impossible to enforce across
projects anyway.

For me I would report that where I notice it, however, I do see you
rationale.

But how should man behave? If you enter
man strncasecmp
should it be the man page for strcasecmp.3 or string.3?

The answer is here:

alx@asus5775:~/src/linux/man-pages/man-pages/main$ cat ./man3/strncasecmp.3
.so man3/strcasecmp.3


I don't know how the man pages are preprocessed before they arrive to you, so in that processing might be the problem. Maybe some information is being lost in the process.

Cheers,

Alex


Then whatis(1) will not find the other pages that also talk
about an interface (of course, ideally, only a page would describe an
interface, but we know that's not reality).

apropos(1) and whatis(1) do indeed behave in a way that surprises me on
my Debian system (man-db 2.9.4-2).  I would have expected multiple
results.

What I expected:

$ whatis rindex
rindex (3)           - locate character in string
string (3)           - string operations
[...and maybe others I haven't thought of]

What I got:
rindex (3)           - locate character in string

I am not sure why further matches are being hidden.

On my Debian testing system this is (more) correct:

index (3)            - findet ein Zeichen in einer Zeichenkette
rindex (3)           - locate character in string

So maybe something on your system? Is this Debian stable or testing?

Greetings

          Helge

--
<http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>

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