re: bin/46081: new apropos claims 'n' as invalid section

[matthew green <mrg%eterna.com.au@localhost>]

> I have sent a patch to Joerg for review, supporting non-numeric
> sections is trivial.

thanks for looking at this.

> makemandb presently indexes only the first character of a section, so
> for a section number like '3f' it stores the section number as '3' in
> the database.
> If you try to do a query for '3'f with apropos, it should not report
> an error, but rather perform a search for section '3'. If it is purely
> desirable that a query for '3f' should query only man pages from
> section '3f' exactly, then it will be a bit of more work, but that is
> also very trivial to do

it seems to me that the right thing is to consider the section
name a string not a number.  (i'm surprised that no one has added
"1m" section to man.conf over the years.)  but this part is not
nearly as important as working at all :)


.mrg.