On Fri, Nov 26, 1999 at 07:58:35AM -0600, Jor-el wrote > Hi, > > I am working on a box which has a standard Slink install. I used > to be able to pull up the man page of dpkg by doing 'man dpkg'. Yesterday, > all of a sudden, this command quit working on me, and I cant figure out > why. The man page was still around - located in /usr/share/man/man8, but > man wasnt picking it up unless I used the '-M' flag to tell it where it > was. > > I tried rebuilding the man database by doing a 'mandb -c', but > this didnt solve it either. In the end, I had to end up editing > /etc/manpath.config and added /usr/share/man to the MANDATORY_MANPATH and > then rebuilding mandb, before my problem could get solved. > > I have two questions : (1) did I solve this the right way? and (2) > Why did this fail in the first place? Any ideas? >
Let me answer your questions in reverse: You don't *really* have a standard Slink install. My guess is that somewhere along the line, you must have installed a new dpkg. The slink dpkg has its man pages under /usr/man, which is the convention adopted for slink; this has chaged for Potato to /usr/share/main, and I'm guessing that you either installed a 'potato' version of dpkg, or rebuilt a potato release from source. I could be wrong, it may also be that upgrading to the potato version of man-db moves your man pages (but then, they all would have moved). The way you fixed it is fine if you anticipate running a 'mixed' installation (some slink, some potato) and won't hurt in any event. Alternatives would be to downgrade to the Slink version of dpkg (but some potato packages, e.g. enlightenment, may require a later version), or to build a 'slinkified' version of the dpkg package, modified to reflect slink conventions: i.e., use /usr/info, /usr/doc and /usr/man in place of /usr/share/info, /usr/share/doc and /usr/share/man (not necessarily a complete list, but they are the changes that spring to mind). John P. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Oh - I - you know - my job is to fear everything." - Bill Gates in Denmark
