Man-DB-2.5.9

[Matthew Burgess]

New version. NEWS has this to say:

man-db 2.5.9 (17 November 2010)
===============================

Major changes since man-db 2.5.8:

        Fixes:
        ------

        o Fix test failures on some systems.  A change made in 2.5.8 was
          overly sensitive to directory ordering.

        o Configuring with --disable-nls works again.

man-db 2.5.8 (15 November 2010)
===============================

Major changes since man-db 2.5.7:

        Fixes:
        ------

        o Fix assertion failure on 'man -l' with an uncompressed page and
          any of --no-hyphenation, --no-justification, or a non-English
          page.

        o 2.5.7 introduced a regression when running catman in some locales,
          most notably in the C locale: while converting the output to
          UTF-8, iconv was run after the compressor rather than before it.
          This release fixes that.

        Improvements:
        -------------

        o Add support for XZ-compressed manual pages, thanks to Darren Salt.

        o Try underscore-separated subpages as well as hyphen-separated
          ones, thanks to Tanguy Ortolo.

        o Build libman and libmandb as shared libraries, reducing installed
          footprint by about 200K (at least on GNU/Linux).

        o libintl is no longer shipped with man-db.  If your system does not
          already have GNU libintl installed and you want man-db's messages
          to be translated, then please install GNU libintl separately
          (http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/).

        o 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.

        o Allow building with an external libpipeline
          (http://libpipeline.nongnu.org/), which has been split out from
          man-db.  This is a transitional measure: a future version of
          man-db will stop shipping its own copy of libpipeline.

        o mandb should no longer repeatedly rescan manual page hierarchies
          when a whatis entry turns into a broken link.

[willimm]

Wow, took them a while. From analyzing the changelog:

• We no longer need the man-assertion patch, so that can be dropped.
• XZ compressed manpages are now supported, this is good for me, since I sometimes do compress my man pages with LZMA/XZ.
• The footprint is slightly smaller (be sure to remeasure the disk space, as always)
• Apparently Man-DB can now optionally use a external library called Libpipeline instead of it's internal implementation. It's a CMMI package, but why add this in when Man-DB can use it's own implementation? Well, it's hinted that Colin will remove this in a future release, and it's better to think ahead and put this in the book before the internal implemtation is removed. As mentioned in the changelog, ​http://libpipeline.nongnu.org/ is the homepage of that package.

This would be pretty decently easy to do, in my opinion.

[Matthew Burgess]

Fixed in r9422.