The man-1.6g is used by other projects and distros. Or at least it was. So it is not reasonable to conclude that if no issue is reported here then man-1.6g has no issues. Of course we know that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Simple enough answer.

Also there was a patch for man-1.6g posted here almost 1 year ago that was not taken. It seems like a good patch.

Funny to me how worked up people get when such simple questions are asked. Like walking into a minefield.

I can remember Ruari posting some fixes a good while back, but he just kept finding more bugs the closer he looked, and it was getting a little whack-a-moleish. No idea whether they made it into current as I've not been following it this time around. I was thinking of swapping to man-db myself (there's a build on slackbuilds.org I've been meaning to try for a while now).

Simply put, it's not our job to search for other bugs reported on other distros. We can't know if it is a bug in the software that affects all distros or only certain distros (maybe based on dependencies used/missing or due to configure options). That is Pat's job. If we find an issue, either within Slackware or on another distro, we're free to report it in the forum (or email Pat directly), and he'll make the final decision on how to manage the problem, but that decision may be to do nothing. If you're having an issue with this program, report it so it can get looked at.

Either Pat missed the patch or felt it wasn't needed. Slackware does not include all patches used in other distros, nor does it use the same software versions other distros use. We don't know why unless Pat addresses it specifically (like he did in another thread about PAM).

It seems you were basing all your conclusions on the fact that the software is buggy and causing you problems. But no problems seem to be reported on the forum and you haven't specifically mentioned any problems you were running into. You seemed to believe that man-1.6g HAS to be upgraded to a newer/different version because it is abandoned, and while that *may* be true on other distros, a piece of software being abandoned is NOT a reason to remove/replace it in Slackware. That will only occur when there is a newer version that Pat believes offers enough benefits over the current one. If you feel there is a project out there that meets this criteria, feel free to let Pat know, and he can make the decision.

And 55020 was referencing SlackBuilds on the slackbuilds.org (SBo) project, not software that is in official Slackware (although, he could've made occasional contributions in the way of bug reports, patches, etc... but those are submitted to Pat, and he'll make the decision whether to include it or not). As far as we know, there is no github available for the official Slackware project, at least not one that is public. If you want to see some of his fixes to the SBo project, have a look here. His name is David Spencer. He's done a lot for that project.

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I'm in the camp where if something works properly then there's no need to rock the boat. If there's a known issue, you know where to find me. Also, it's been a while since I've looked at man alternatives, but if the newer way requires keeping a database in sync then it's probably not an improvement. It's not like parsing nroff takes much time on a modern machine (this is why we quit caching the cat pages).

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No need to give a good beer a bad rap!

Probably more a symptom of accumulated frustrations resulting from the rapidly changing environment, coincident with an enthusiastic new user.

Somewhat similar to the poor zoo keeper who, after 25 years of calmly working the snake house, has a cumulative case of the willies.

Have another one on me.

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It was a simple question of where is upstream for man-1.6g. Add all the drama you want.

I can tell by your reply that you didn't bother reading through the posts either like the other poster.

I think the user name was manach or mancha, can't find the link at the moment. But it's not relevant to the simple question that was asked.

Asking a simple question is rocking the boat here. That's funny. I barely care about the man-1.6g, just something I ran into after encountering a problem with the man-pages.

Agree about a db for man pages, seems like creature feep and for no gain.

Ahh yes, that sounds right. I was mis-attributing. My apologies to Mancha.

I read through every post on this thread (as I read through pretty much every post on the forum). I haven't searched for it, but as it seems to be referenced by others, there is no current upstream for man-1.6g. What more do you want? I then went and explained that just because a project is abandoned, does not mean it'll get removed or replaced in Slackware.

I wish Pat would've kept his original reply here. It was much better suited than his edit...

FWIW, I did go searching, and like Rinndalir, I could not find a current formal maintainer of man-1.6g.
The project appears to have been formerly maintained at http://freecode.com/projects/man, but
http://freecode.com/about
Prior to that date, the code was also made available at Sourceforge http://sourceforge.net/projects/msys.../man/man-1.6g/
There is nothing after the announcement of the release of 1.6g at the announcement mailing list at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/man-announce/
There is an example of a patch for man-1.6g being conducted at GitHub https://github.com/Alexpux/MSYS2-pac...6g-2.src.patch

The lack of a current formal maintainer does not appear to stop other distributions from continuing with man-1.6g

Guessing the number of programs or data files that should be removed from Slackware (or any other Linux distribution) if having a formal maintainer was a requirement to include them is left to the reader as an exercise

Sorry, I promised not to post again in this thread, but I couldn't resist.

So what was the problem you encountered ?

Hi Rinndalir.

To answer your questions:

The man suite Slackware uses is no longer being developed (the last release I am aware of is 1.6g). You can find the source code for versions 1.5 and 1.6 here.

Back in October of last year, frankbell reported buggy apropos output on Slackware. I investigated and found the problem within makewhatis's awk code. I fixed it in my awk-like-a-boss patch.

However, during my review (and with input from MadMaverick9) I began finding more & more bugs. I decided the easiest/quickest approach was to adapt man-db to gracefully co-exist with Slackware's man package. I called my adaptation man-db-lite. That package adds: makewhatis-ng, apropos-ng, and whatis-ng.

This thread has instructions on how to fix Slackware's apropos/makewhatis bug and how to build the man-db-lite package.

--mancha

PS GazL, no worries about the mis-attribution. Oh, and good to see you back on LQ.

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Thanks mancha. I came back to report a specific issue, and then someone asked a question and I thought "I know the answer to that; would be mean not to help...", and then before you know it you're drawn back in.


My pet peeve with man on slackware is that a "man 3 readdir" gives you the gawk function readdir(3am) rather than the C readdir(3), owing to this:
(note: they're also not gzipped!)

I did send a mail with a patch for the slackbuild to Pat, suggesting moving them to usr/man/man3am/ -- which is what I believe some other distro do in order to separate the awk functions and prevent the collision -- but I never heard back.