Man-db-2.5.3

[Matthew Burgess]

New version. Now uses GDBM instead of Berkeley DB by default. Other changes in docs/NEWS in the tarball.

[willimm]

Isn't this the one that the maintaner promised?

Anyway, here are the fixes:

• Cleaned up a number of possible crashes, memory leaks, and missing error checks found by the Coverity Scan project.

• Fix build if MAN_CATS is undefined.

• If the LINGUAS environment variable is set while running configure, it now controls building and installation of localised manual pages as well as program translations.

• The LANGUAGE environment variable is now tokenised properly, rather than only taking the first two characters of each element.

• Fix build if --disable-nls is used or iconv is not available.

• man now correctly propagates the exit code of whatis or apropos when called with the -f or -k option respectively.

And the improvments:

• A number of inconsistencies and readability problems with man-db's own manual pages have been cleaned up, thanks mainly to Yuri Kozlov.

• Reduce the number of warnings emitted when using an unrecognised locale.

• manconv and zsoelim are now called internally rather than by executing external programs, to improve performance.

• man-db now uses GDBM (--with-db=gdbm) in preference to Berkeley DB (--with-db=db or --with-db=dbN where N is 1, 2, 3, or 4) by default, since hardware improvements have rendered Berkeley DB's speed advantages negligible for our purposes and the relatively frequent SONAME and on-disk format changes are not worth the hassle. Distributors should note that if they follow this change then they will need to arrange for databases to be rebuilt on upgrade to this version.

• Manual pages may now be compressed with LZMA (although this is probably only worth it for very large pages).

• Duplicate manual page hierarchies due to symlinks (e.g. /usr/man -> /usr/share/man) are detected and removed from the search order.

• A locale modifier (e.g. @latin) in a directory name must now match the locale if the former is set, in addition to the language and territory.

• Bare .so includes (e.g. ".so foo.1" rather than ".so man1/foo.1") now work, although only within the same manual page hierarchy for now.

The summary:

• He debugged the fatal bugs using Coverty.
• Some other mostly language releated bugfixes are there.
• The man pages were improved.
• GDBM is now the default.
• A few locale improvments.
• Man pages can now be compressed with LZMA.
• The /usr/man and /usr/local/man symlinks are removed from dection automaticaly now.

[Matthew Burgess]

Fixed in r8762. This was a straight version upgrade though, no changes to the configuration were made. I'll raise another ticket to cover the fact that we may want to move to GDBM + fix up any other configuration issues that Ken documented on lfs-dev.