Bugzilla Bug 23848

when running makewhatis from /etc/cron.daily/makewhatis.cron, it makes the
whatis database for /usr/share/man and then goes through /usr/man, and guess
what?  they're symlinked to the same directory!  

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. run /usr/sbin/makewhatis -v
2. examine the paths that go flying by
3.

Actual Results:  
the same directory was makewhatis'd twice.

Expected Results:  
only /usr/share/man should have gotten makewhatis'd.

a possible solution would be to use the -w option to makewhatis in
/etc/cron.daily/makewhatis.cron.

Assigning to me...

adding -w fixes it on the console, but the cron daemon wont have MANPATH set,
so will use the default path, which traverses the manpages twice...

the two obvious fixes are either removing one of the paths from the default
path, or getting MANPATH set.

an update to man is available, ive added a `source /etc/profile.env` line to
the makewhatis.cron and used -w.

Any testing appreciated :)

I tested the fix, that is I changed makewhatis.cron to be

source /etc/profile.env
/usr/sbin/makewhatis -w

but it doesn't work at all, because it can't find simple things like basename and sh :).  The problem is that /etc/profile.env doesn't put /bin and /usr/bin in the PATH, because its not designed to be sourced directly.  However, sourcing /etc/profile works great:

source /etc/profile
/usr/sbin/makewhatis -w

Yup, your right, my mistake :)

i've decided to change it and remove the duplicate paths from makewhatis, we already apply a patch from Redhat that changes the default paths, so ive just amended that.

This should be closed, Fixing status....