Quote:
Originally Posted by onebuck
Hi,
In your profile it shows Solaris. Is this the OS that you are querying about man(9)?
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Arrggh! [banging head on desk] I never mentioned that this was on OpenSUSE.
I could fire up my old Ultra60 and see what xman shows on that system but I'd have to haul the thing out of the back room and get it reconnected to the LAN. For now I'll take your word that section 9 shows up on Solaris's xman.
I've fixed the missing Section "9" entry though it took some doing. (Caution: long-winded description of the fix process follows. If it feels a little disjointed, I blame that on constant interruptions from phone calls, folks asking me questions, etc.)
There is a manpath.config file under /etc but as far as I can tell, it appears to be OK. It appears to set up the man subsystem for all of the section 1-8 manpages and for a slew of other sections as well.
Code:
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SECTION 0 1 n l 8 3 2 5 4 9 6 7 1x 3x 4x 5x 6x 8x 1bind 3bind 5bind 7bind 8bind 1cn 8cn 1m 1mh 5mh 8mh 1netpbm 3netpbm 5netpbm 0p 1p 3p 3posix 1pgsql 3pgsql 5pgsql 3C++ 8C++ 3blt 3curses 3ncurses 3form 3menu 3db 3gdbm 3f 3gk 3paper 3mm 5mm 3perl 3pm 3pq 3qt 3pub 3readline 1ssl 3ssl 5ssl 7ssl 3t 3tk 3tcl 3tclx 3tix 7l 7nr 8c Cg g s m
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I decided not to touch this file as the syntax is pretty complex and not well described. I ran across some mention of "man.conf" but there isn't any information on the system about that file -- especially in section 5 where the format should be described -- even though it's referenced in the xman manpage.
I tried manually adding the "man[1-9]" directories to MANPATH, exported it, and fired up xman. Only the numbered sections 1-8 appear in the 'Section' drop down menu; "9" did not show up. (I didn't really expect this to work as I've never seen a MANPATH specify anything deeper than a "man" directory on any Unix system.)
Just for fun, I ran
Code:
strace -v xman 2>&1 | tee /tmp/xman.trace
for various settings of MANPATH and grepped through the resulting log file for instances of file opens -- especially those that did not fail (i.e. did not have an exit status of "ENOENT") -- and found no cases of a successful open of "manpath.conf", "man.conf", or anything like that. Funny thing, though, is that xman
is accessing the contents of MANPATH because I saw an open() call looking for the PostgreSQL manpages out under "/opt/app/postgresql/share/man" that is specified in my MANPATH variable (part of the directory tree where Pg is installed on my system). When I had manually added the "man[1-9]" directories xman was looking in those as well. But all these opens were for a file "mandesc" under each MANPATH entry and they were all failing. Hmm...
Everything I've read says that MANPATH controls what directories xman will display but that's not exactly true as I saw with the strace output. Information over at the Xorg web site indicates that /etc/man.conf is used but I saw no evidence that xman was even trying to open that file -- I didn't see an attempt to access it in my strace log -- and, as I expected, when I created one, it had no effect on the menus. (Outdated documentation?)
Recalling all the open() fails I saw in the strace output for "mandesc" files, I found a description of the format for that file on the X.org web site. (It was basically a prettier version of what you posted.) The docs mention that a "mandesc" file
may also be used to control xman. I created one -- using an example shown on the Xorg/Xman pages -- and
that is -- so far -- the
only thing that has made the section "9" pages show up. My version of the mandesc page is:
Code:
no default sections
1(1) User Commands
2(2) System Calls
3(3) Subroutines
4(4) Devices
5(5) File Formats
6(6) Games
7(7) Miscellaneous
8(8) Sys. Administration
9(9) Kernel Routines
l(l) Local
n(n) New
o(o) Old
A variation on the example on the X.org site and your previous reply. I'll try something like:
Code:
9(9) Kernel Routines
and see if the default sections are automagically filled in so I don't have to explicitly specify those. For good measure I copied this file to each entry in MANPATH -- probably overkill and I'll fix it later after testing if I find they're extraneous -- but now the xman Section drop-down menu shows the section 9 pages.
Now on to figuring out what those manpages under the "man0p" directory are all about and getting those added to the menu. (Looks like descriptions of POSIX header files.) I suspect I'll have to get creative if I try and add menu entries for the manpages for many of the sections that are listed in the entries in that SECTION variable in manpath.config. Xman's mandesc doesn't use more than one character to define a section entry.
Anyway... thanks for the hint. Well, maybe not a hint exactly but faced with the prospect of schlepping 50+ pounds of Sparcstation around and reconnecting it to the network just to see how Solaris had things set up and perhaps copying that, I found I'd rather scour the Internet for whatever information I could find on xman. And I got to use a few tools I hadn't touched for a while, too.
Later...
--
Rick