Using the /etc/man.conf as installed by the man package, doing "man -k someterm", "apropos someterm", or "whatis someterm" returns doubled results [1]. I think that the presence of both /usr/man and /usr/share/man in the MANPATH variable in /etc/man.conf is confusing these utilities, since /usr/man is just a symlink to /usr/share/man. The result is that they see the one /usr/share/man/whatis database as two different databases. Commenting out either of these paths fixes the problem for me. I currently have man-1.5k installed. I had the same problem with an earlier version of man, fixed it, and forgot about it until it returned with a recent emerge. [1] doing "man -k slrn", for example, returns: slrn (1) - An easy to use NNTP / spool based newsreader slrnpull (1) - Pull a small newsfeed for offline reading slrn (1) - An easy to use NNTP / spool based newsreader slrnpull (1) - Pull a small newsfeed for offline reading on my system. Commenting out the line "MANPATH /usr/man" from /etc/man.conf fixes this.
It will behave like this, because /usr/man is a symlink to /usr/share/man. Question now is how you want to break things .... 1) remove /usr/man, and cause some manpages to not get installed/whatnot 2) remove the setting from /etc/man.conf, and if the admin have /usr/man as a dir and not a symlink, disable man from searching /usr/man for pages (depending on how clever the admin is, and on what his expectations are).
Right. I understand why it behaves that way. Could /usr/man be made a real directory by default, instead of a symlink as it is now? There must be some reason it is a symlink; all I can think of it is that having it as a symlink makes hand-installed packages effectively put their man pages into /usr/share/man as Gentoo packages do. It seems to me that the system shouldn't do weird things like returning doubled results by default, though. While not "broken", that's not exactly "clean", either. I don't see your option 1) as something anybody would ever want to do; you wouldn't remove /usr/man, you'd make it into a real directory. I see the downside of option 2). However, if there's some good reason to have /usr/man be a symlink in the first place, then why would Gentoo go out out of its way to support having it be a real directory? Either there's a really good reason for /usr/man to be a symlink, and /etc/man.conf can be adjusted to reflect that, or there's not such a good reason, and /usr/man should just be a made a real directory in the first place. Well, it's obviously not that big a deal in any case, and I guess that people who are annoyed by the behavior will fix it in their own way. In any case, thanks for the attention to the matter. This is a great distro.
Reason is to get everything installed into /usr/share/man by default. This dates back from the time that we did not have sandbox, and could not properly track stuff (as some things installed the manpages, etc directly into /, and not the fake build root). Lets just say I tried to provoke you to get a good reason for changing it ;-) Ill ponder a bit on it, and decide the best course of action after maybe discussing it with the other devs.
Ok, this is fixed in man-1.5k-r1 ... You need groff-1.18 though, so its been arch masked.
