Regression in Man-DB-2.5.7

[Mickaël Blanchard]

I noticed a regression in Man-DB 2.5.7, which may require a patch in current LFS 6.6 and SVN branch.

When trying to display any man page located in a directory /usr/share/man/<language>, I get the following error:
man: man.c:2393: display: Assertion `decomp->ncommands == 1' failed. Aborted

Two notices:

• This problem doesn't occur when I gzip the manpages present in the problematic directories,
  
• The problem doesn't exist in Man-DB-2.5.6.

[willimm]

Fixes the assertion error when Man-DB tries to display certan man pages (ie: the man page for ifort, and forigen language man pages) that causes Man-DB to quit.

[willimm]

You don't really have to downgrade to Man-DB 2.5.6 to fix the issue, you can just use my attached patch.

Apparently this is a well known issue with this release of Man-DB, and is specific to that version, so 2.5.8 will fix this issue, and that's why 2.5.6 didn't have that issue.

[bdubbs@…]

Thanks for the patch William. I added it to the patches repository. One minor thing. In a patch, please format the description to wrap at 80 characters.

We may want to hold off a little bit to see if a new version is released before putting this in the book, but it looks like they make releases every six months or so. The most recent release was February, so I'm not terribly optimistic about a release in the near future. If there is no release in the next week or two, I'll add it to the book.

[willimm]

Well, Bruce, a 2.5.8 is in the works, (there is a 2.5.8-pre1 version, available at ​http://people.debian.org/~cjwatson/man-db/man-db-2.5.8-pre1.tar.gz), but the maintainer usually waits for translation updates before making a new release, so yes, he is aware of the issue, and he has a 2.5.8 in the works, but it might take a little while to release.

Oh, and he was also wondering why we type man-db as Man-DB and not man-db (with no capitals), which, according to the maintainer, is the correct way to type it.

[bdubbs@…]

I'll hold off updating the book for a little more. Thanks for the update.

We capitalize all the packages as is standard for titles. Since we use the package names as proper nouns, we're fairly consistent (but not totally) in the capitalization used as text, although we use the case-sensitive names in the instructions.

[bdubbs@…]

Added the patch in revision 9286.