Re: Conflicting alias for some man pages

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

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Hi Branden, Ingo, and Colin,

On 12/3/22 17:36, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> 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

Could you please confirm if this is a bug in the Linux man-pages, or is it 
something desirable?  I find it a bit weird that we need to specify a NAME only 
once.  Then whatis(1) will not find the other pages that also talk about an 
interface (of course, ideally, only a page would describe an interface, but we 
know that's not reality).

Cheers,

Alex

>>
>> 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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