On Fri, 2015-10-23 at 11:38 +0200, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> On Oct 22 12:03, Warren Young wrote:
> > Several gawk module manual pages (fnmatch, fork, readdir, and
> > time(3am)) currently shadow pages of the same name in section 3p,
> > owned by man-pages-posix. These are currently dumped into the generic
> > man3 directory, which causes them to take precedence over 3p because
> > of this line in /etc/man_db.conf:
> >
> > SECTION 1 1p 8 2 3 3p 4 5 6 7 9 0p n
> >
> > This causes “man readdir” to return the gawk page, not the POSIX page,
> > as the user almost certainly intended.
> >
> > To fix this, the man_db maintainer should add a 3am after 3p here, and
> > the gawk maintainer should install the pages into the man3am
> > directory.
> >
> > Alternately, 3p could move in front of 3, since it’s more specific.
> > (You could say that man3p subclasses man3.)
>
> Yaakov, how do we go about that? I'm open to all suggestions, including
> dropping gawk and man-db from the distro ;)
Ironic, given that awk and man are both required by POSIX, without which
we wouldn't care about 3p. :-)
On Linux, 'man readdir' gets you readdir(2) (the kernel system call),
which promptly states:
This is not the function you are interested in. Look at readdir(3)
for the POSIX conforming C library interface.
So you have to 'man 3 readdir' for the glibc function documentation,
'man 3p readdir' for the POSIX specification, and 'man 3am readdir' for
the gawk extension documentation. The bottom line is that when there
are pages with the same name, you just need to be specific if you want
to get the right thing. Therefore, I see nothing to fix in either
package.
--
Yaakov
