Bug 900579 – app-alternatives/awk-4 does not manage /usr/share/man/man1/awk.1.bz2 symlink

• Status: CONFIRMED
• Product: Gentoo Linux

[Description John R. Graham 2023-03-09 14:21:12 UTC]

The /usr/share/man/man1/awk.1.bz2 symlink is managed by sys-apps/gawk instead of app-alternatives/awk. Since /usr/bin/man prefers the compressed man page, the (correctly managed) /usr/share/man/awk.1 file is ignored when the awk man page is displayed when anything else but gawk is selected by USE flag when emerging app-alternatives/awk.

Conditions to cause the bug to manifest:
1. Start with an "out of box" Gentoo install, which prefers gawk.
2. Install an alternative awk, for example:

       USE="-gawk nawk" emerge -1v awk

Now /usr/share/man/man1/awk.1 will correctly render the nawk man page, but /usr/share/man/man1/awk.1.bz2 is still symlinked to the gawk man page, so running

       man awk

will get you the gawk man page instead of the nawk one.

[Comment 1 Sam James 2023-03-10 02:31:23 UTC]

Please include emerge --info for completeness.

[Comment 2 John R. Graham 2023-03-10 02:42:00 UTC]

Created attachment 857085 [details]
emerge --info as requested.

[Comment 3 Michał Górny 2023-03-10 05:05:57 UTC]

That's weird because app-alternatives/awk definitely has stale symlink cleanup code.

[Comment 4 John R. Graham 2023-03-10 13:15:08 UTC]

In my read-through of the awk ebuild and the app-alternatives eclass, I didn't immediately find any code that looked like it was managing the _compressed_ man page symlink that the gawk ebuild leaves behind:

ceres ~ # ls -lrt /usr/share/man/man1/awk*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Mar 10 07:40 /usr/share/man/man1/awk.1.bz2 -> gawk.1.bz2
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 11 Mar 10 07:44 /usr/share/man/man1/awk.1

[Comment 5 Sam James 2023-03-10 13:19:06 UTC]

(In reply to John R. Graham from comment #4)
> In my read-through of the awk ebuild and the app-alternatives eclass, I
> didn't immediately find any code that looked like it was managing the
> _compressed_ man page symlink that the gawk ebuild leaves behind:
> 
> ceres ~ # ls -lrt /usr/share/man/man1/awk*
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Mar 10 07:40 /usr/share/man/man1/awk.1.bz2 ->
> gawk.1.bz2
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 11 Mar 10 07:44 /usr/share/man/man1/awk.1

https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/tree/app-alternatives/awk/awk-4.ebuild#n65 should catch it?

(It was added for bug 884427).

[Comment 6 John R. Graham 2023-03-10 16:57:04 UTC]

Ah. Yes. That version wasn't in tree when I did my read-through. Still, an emerge of sys-apps/gawk will re-establish the symlink and does not currently force the rebuild of app-alternatives/awk (which would now remove it). I guess that means that the gawk ebuild needs a tweak as well.

[Comment 7 Mike Gilbert 2023-03-10 17:44:00 UTC]

I suppose we could just drop pkg_preinst and pkg_postinst from sys-apps/gawk now hat app-alternatives/awk is stable.

[Comment 8 Mike Gilbert 2023-03-10 17:45:03 UTC]

Err, I mean pkg_postist and pkg_postrm.