Re: Conflicting alias for some man pages

[Alejandro Colomar <alx.manpages@gmail.com>]

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Hi Helge!

On 12/3/22 15:01, Helge Kreutzmann wrote:
> Hello Alejandro,
> hello Michael,
> short description:
> Please remove duplicates in the alias (alternative) names of man
> pages. (List of known examples at the end).
> 
> Long description:
> 
> I support Mario in maintaining the translation of manpages
> (manpages-l10n) and I'm also the Debian maintainer of manpages-l10n.
> 
> Some man pages describe multiple, related commands, functions,
> interfaces, …. In the english case, man automatically figures this
> out, so that you can call the man page under each name without any
> further manual configuration (at least in Debian, where I tried it).
> 
> Up to recently, manpages-l10n shipped the translated main man page,
> e.g. if
> command1.1
> contains
> 
> NAME
> commmand1, command2 - Description
> 
> manpages-l10n shipped e.g. de/man1/command1.1
> 
> Under Debian then the following happend:
> If I ran
> man command1
> I saw the German version, however, with
> man command2
> I got the english version, if it exists, otherwise the German version.
> 
> The maintainer of man requested that I provide explicit symlinks for
> these man pages[1], which I implemented for the last upload of
> manpages-l10n to Debian.
> 
> While doing this, I noticed that some alternative names (aliases)
> where used multiple times. This caused link creation to fail (for the
> second and further occurences) and should also cause "random"
> behaviour for the english pages (as man could select from several
> pages).
> 
> 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
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Greetings
> 
>              Helge
> 
> [1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1020742

So, if I understand correctly, specifying the same name in the .SH NAME section 
in more than one page is problematic, right?  It makes sense to me.  I'm a bit 
surprised that this bug hasn't been reported though, but otherwise I'm fine 
fixing it.

I CCed a few people that have a lot more experience than I do, and will probably 
be able to tell if I understood the problem correctly.

So, since we're still on time for the Debian freeze, if you confirm that this is 
the issue and the following fix is correct, I'll implement it and release 
man-pages-6.02 later this month; the solstice seems a proper day for a release, 
celebrating the new Sun.  Thanks for the report!

So, I'll try to find a complete list of duplicate NAMEs, and keep only one of them.


Cheers,

Alex


P.S.: The biggest implication of fixing this before the freeze is that I'll 
release VLA syntax for function parameters, something which I wasn't expecting 
to do so soon.  It seems that Moltke was right[1].  I'm still convinced that 
it's a good change, so let's see how these radical changes are received.  ;)


[1]: <https://lore.kernel.org/linux-man/20221110094033.ptpfsqpvvx2yd5xs@illithid/>

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

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