Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2000 16:57:14 +1200 (NZST)
From: John Hawkinson <jhawk@mit.edu>
Reply-To: jhawk@mit.edu
To: gnats-bugs@gnats.netbsd.org
Subject: whatis displays (wrong arch.) manpages that man does not


>Number:         9744
>Category:       bin
>Synopsis:       whatis displays (wrong arch.) manpages that man does not
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       non-critical
>Priority:       low
>Responsible:    bin-bug-people
>State:          open
>Class:          sw-bug
>Submitter-Id:   net
>Arrival-Date:   Fri Mar 31 16:30:02 PST 2000
>Closed-Date:    
>Last-Modified:  
>Originator:     John Hawkinson
>Release:        NetBSD 1.4.2
>Organization:
	MIT
>Environment:

	
System: NetBSD zorkmid.mit.edu 1.4.2 NetBSD 1.4.2 (ZORKMID) #10: Mon Mar 27 12:33:31 CST 2000 jhawk@zorkmid.mit.edu:/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/ZORKMID i386




>Description:
	whatis(1) will display manpages that are not present in the default
search path for man(1). This occurs, for instance, with architecture-specific
manpages for an architecture which is not the current one.


	This is only slightly annoying if the manpage is *obviously*
for the wrong architecture (e.g. "ms (4) - Atari mouse interface"),
but it's much more disconcerting where the architecture-specificity
is not clear from the manpage synopsis (e.g. "msconfig (1) - Show or change
the middle button emulation mode").


>How-To-Repeat:


zorkmid% whatis msconfig
msconfig  (1) - Show or change the middle button emulation mode
msconfig (1) - Show or change the middle button emulation mode
zorkmid% man -w msconfig
man: no entry for msconfig in the manual.
zorkmid% env MACHINE=atari man -w msconfig
/usr/share/man/cat1/atari/msconfig.0
/usr/share/man/man1/atari/msconfig.1


>Fix:

	
I really don't know (again). Perhaps there need to be machine-specific
whatis databases in /usr/share/man/*/${MACHINE}. Perhaps the whatis database
should have an architecture field, but of course that would make it
gratuitously incompatible. One could disdain architectural solutions
to this problem and make sure that all manpages that are architecture-specific
make this clear in their synopses; this would be inadequate, of course, but
may be better than nothing (or worse if it encourages the problem to remain
extant)
>Release-Note:
>Audit-Trail:
>Unformatted: