The files /usr/share/man/man1/*.1.gz owned by binutils (e.g. /usr/share/man/man1/addr2line.1.gz or /usr/share/man/man1/strings.1.gz) are (zip of) empty files on the (ppc) install livecd. Explicitly re-emerging binutils 2.15.90.0.3-r3 solves the problem. I suspect that pod2man (or another tool needed to build the man pages) is missing when building the livecd, and that the binutils makefile doesn't consider it to be an error, or something like that. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. man strings # with binutils from the livecd installation 2. 3. Actual Results: Error reading man page /usr/share/man/man1/strings.1.gz No manual entry for strings Expected Results: Give the man page of strings
So you're saying the man pages on the CD itself are missing?
> So you're saying the man pages on the CD itself are missing? If by "on the CD" you mean on the bootable system of the CD, then no. I'm saying this: I installed gentoo from the livecd (one month ago). I don't know exactly how binutils came on my system, but I guess it was in the stage3-G4-2004.3.tar.bz2. Then, I installed many packages using emerge. It is only recently that I remarked that the man pages provided with binutils are empty (i.e. the files are here but they (zip of) empty files) I reemerged explicitly binutils, then the man pages were OK. This is why I think that there were a "slightly broken" version of binutils (2.5.90.0.3-r3) on the tarball from the CD. Actually, the log of the re-emerging shows that the compilation of man pages works like this ("ld" is just an example, there is also "strings, "addr2line", etc) touch ld.1 perl ./../etc/texi2pod.pl -Dman < ./ld.texinfo > ld.pod (pod2man --center="GNU Development Tools" --release="binutils-2.15.90.0.3" --section=1 ld.pod | \ sed -e '/^.if n .na/d' > ld.1.T$$ && \ mv -f ld.1.T$$ ld.1) || \ (rm -f ld.1.T$$ && exit 1) so that if pod2man fails, then an empty ld.1 is still created. That's why I wonder whether pod2man was there and/or worked correctly at the time of building the tarball on the CD. [maybe that is actually not a LiveCD bug but a dependency/makefile problem of binutils!]
Please see Bug #35762 (marked "RESOLVED" for reasons unknown) and the countless identical bug reports since then that may or may not have been marked a duplicate.
This will be fixed with 2005.0's release.
So was this resolved with 2005.0?
Question; what changed? Which of the problems that led to this bug have been eliminated in 2005.0? Are those problematic manpages now non-empty or are they still empty?
Considering that between releases we change things like binutils versions, eclass revisions, and other such changes, I couldn't possibly tell you what has changed, which is why I asked you to test if this has changed. It may have been resolved via changes to eclasses/binutils packages and we were unaware. Please REOPEN with the requested information.
And that is why I think the real cause is still not very well understood. New binutils are not likely to have any effect; there's nothing broken there. New eclass revisions, don't think there's much an eclass can help. The real problem is at the stage it builds binutils there's an item missing, nicely explained in comment #2. For confirmation, I told you about bug #35762 that comes to teh same conclusion. After comment #4 I had some hope; it's a problem with the release media; bug is assigned to "Gentoo Release Team"; comment says it'll be fixed in 2005.0. Six months later; assignee doesn't know. Fix would have been add missing item to stage image; if the makers of stage image don't know if that's been done or not; who else is supposed to know? Endusers can only confirm/reproduce this bug by doing a complete reinstall from scratch! (not an option); that's why I asked what changed on the install medium. Testers at gentoo should be able to determine the fixedness of this bug with almost no extra work.
Alright, allow *me* to explain a little something. We changed how the release media was built between 2004.3 and 2005.0's release. Also, I am a single person working all of these bugs. All you have to do is download a tarball and unpack it, to see if the files are there. It really is not that hard of a task to perform and doesn't require anything more than a little bit of your time. The stages are built automatically. This means that if something was missing from the stage before, it was a bug in the beuild and not something done intentionally. The new stages are also built automatically. So no, I really do not know what goes into them without looking myself, as they are calculated based on the profile used to build the stage. Also, the release team (namely me) does not maintain these ebuilds, so I couldn't tell you what changed in them without verifying them myself, just as you could do. There is really nothing here that requires *me* to look at it that cannot be done by yourself, which is why I requested information from you. Now, can you please check the stage3 from 2005.0 and let me know if these man pages are there, as we are well into the 2005.1 release and I would like to be able to resolve this for sure, if it was not fixed in 2005.0's release. We have also made changes to the 2005.1 build, in that a minimal perl has been added, so it is possible that this will resolve the situation if 2005.0 does not already have it resolved. Anyway, I am waiting for feeback on this, so the status stays.
