On Wed, 16 Mar 2011, Sven Joachim wrote:
On 2011-03-15 03:54 +0100, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
Package: ncurses-doc
Version: 5.8+20110307-1
Note that none of this is new, the same problem exists in the
libncurses5-dev package in squeeze and lenny which held the
documentation before I split it out to ncurses-doc.
ncurses-doc has /usr/share/doc/ncurses-doc/html/man/*.3x.html files,
but not the corresponding man pages in /usr/share/man/man3.
More exactly, the manpages are there, but not under the same names.
This is because they are renamed (see man/man_db.renames in the ncurses
source tree), while the HTML documentation does not receive such
treatment.
I don't know why this setup with renaming manpages exists, but it has
been around at least since ncurses 4.1, released 1997.
Before that - man_db.renames was added in October 1995. At that point,
only the files were renamed (no link-fixes), and I added the edit_man.sh
script in mid-1996 (I seem to recall that was to obsolete some scripting
in the Debian package - or perhaps I'm recalling some later refinement).
My understanding was that it was done that way to follow some Debian
guideline.
Note that some other man pages, e.g. reset(1), have references to
such man pages in the "SEE ALSO" section, so that it is annoying
not to have access to these man pages with "man".
This is a fallout from the following change mentioned in NEWS:
,----
| 20061230
| [...]
| + used linklint to verify links in the HTML documentation, made fixes
| to manpages as needed.
`----
That change fixed the links in the HTML documentation, but broke the
references in the manpages themselves.
The html documentation _could_ be generated to be consistent with the
manpages, but that would complicate the Debian package...
--
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net
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