lfs-book/chapter06/man-db.xml

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  <!ENTITY % general-entities SYSTEM "../general.ent">
  %general-entities;
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<sect1 id="ch-system-man-db" role="wrap">
<title>Man-DB-&man-db-version;</title>
<?dbhtml filename="man-db.html"?>

<indexterm zone="ch-system-man-db"><primary sortas="a-Man-DB">Man-DB</primary></indexterm>

<sect2 role="package"><title/>
<para>The Man-DB package contains programs for finding and viewing man pages.</para>

<segmentedlist>
<segtitle>&buildtime;</segtitle>
<segtitle>&diskspace;</segtitle>
<seglistitem><seg>0.1 SBU</seg><seg>1.1 MB</seg></seglistitem>
</segmentedlist>

<segmentedlist>
<segtitle>&dependencies;</segtitle>
<seglistitem><seg>Bash, Binutils, Coreutils, Gawk, GCC, DB,
Glibc, Gettext, Grep, Make, and Sed</seg></seglistitem>
</segmentedlist>
</sect2>

<sect2 role="installation">
<title>Installation of Man-DB</title>

<para>Three adjustments need to be made to the sources of Man-DB.</para>

<para>The first one changes the location of translated manual pages that come
with Man-DB, in order for them to be accessible in both traditional and
UTF-8 locales:</para>

<screen><userinput>mv man/de{_DE.88591,} &amp;&amp;
mv man/es{_ES.88591,} &amp;&amp;
mv man/it{_IT.88591,} &amp;&amp;
mv man/ja{_JP.eucJP,} &amp;&amp;
sed -i 's,\*_\*,??,' man/Makefile.in</userinput></screen>

<para>The second change is a <command>sed</command> substitution to delete the
<quote>/usr/man</quote> lines in the
<filename>man_db.conf</filename> file to prevent redundant results when
using programs such as <command>whatis</command>:</para>

<screen><userinput>sed -i '/\t\/usr\/man/d' src/man_db.conf.in</userinput></screen>

<para>The third change accounts for programs that Man-DB should be able
to find at runtime, but that haven't been installed yet:</para>

<screen><userinput>cat &gt;&gt;include/manconfig.h.in &lt;&lt;"EOF"
<literal>#define WEB_BROWSER "exec /usr/bin/lynx"
#define COL "/usr/bin/col"
#define VGRIND "/usr/bin/vgrind"
#define GRAP "/usr/bin/grap"</literal>
EOF</userinput></screen>

<para>The <command>col</command> program is a part of the Util-linux package,
<command>lynx</command> is a text-based web browser
(see BLFS for installation instructions),
<command>vgrind</command> converts program sources to Groff input,
and <command>grap</command> is useful for typesetting graphs in Groff documents.
The <command>vgrind</command> and <command>grap</command> programs are
not normally needed for viewing manual pages. They are
not part of LFS or BLFS, but you should be able to install them yourself
after finishing LFS if you wish to do so.</para>

<para>Prepare Man-DB for compilation:</para>

<screen><userinput>./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-mb-groff --disable-setuid</userinput></screen>

<para>The meaning of the configure options:</para>

<variablelist>
<varlistentry>
<term><parameter>--enable-mb-groff</parameter></term>
<listitem><para>This tells the <command>man</command> program to
use the <quote>ascii8</quote> and <quote>nippon</quote> Groff devices for formatting non-ISO-8859-1
manual pages.</para></listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><parameter>--disable-setuid</parameter></term>
<listitem><para>This disables making the <command>man</command> program
setuid to user <quote>man</quote>.</para></listitem>
</varlistentry>
</variablelist>

<para>Compile the package:</para>

<screen><userinput>make</userinput></screen>

<para>Install the package:</para>

<screen><userinput>make install</userinput></screen>

<para>Additional information regarding the compression of
man and info pages can be found in the BLFS book at
<ulink url="&blfs-root;view/cvs/postlfs/compressdoc.html"/>.</para>

</sect2>

<sect2><title>Non-English Manual Pages in LFS</title>

<para>Linux distributions have different policies concerning the character
encoding in which manual pages are stored in the filesystem. E.g., RedHat
stores all manual pages in UTF-8, while Debian uses language-specific
(mostly 8-bit) encodings. This leads to incompatibility of packages with
manual pages designed for different distributions.</para>

<para>LFS uses the same conventions as Debian. The relationship between
language codes and the expected encoding of manual pages is listed below.
Man-DB automatically converts them to the locale encoding while viewing.</para>

<!-- Origin: man-db-2.4.3/src/encodings.c -->
<table frame='all'><title>Expected character encoding of manual pages</title>
<tgroup cols='2' align='center' colsep='1' rowsep='1'>
<thead>
<row><entry>Language (code)</entry><entry>Encoding</entry></row>
</thead>
<tbody>
<row><entry>Danish (da)</entry><entry>ISO-8859-1</entry></row>
<row><entry>German (de)</entry><entry>ISO-8859-1</entry></row>
<row><entry>English (en)</entry><entry>ISO-8859-1</entry></row>
<row><entry>Spanish (es)</entry><entry>ISO-8859-1</entry></row>
<row><entry>Finnish (fi)</entry><entry>ISO-8859-1</entry></row>
<row><entry>French (fr)</entry><entry>ISO-8859-1</entry></row>
<row><entry>Irish (ga)</entry><entry>ISO-8859-1</entry></row>
<row><entry>Galician (gl)</entry><entry>ISO-8859-1</entry></row>
<row><entry>Indonesian (id)</entry><entry>ISO-8859-1</entry></row>
<row><entry>Icelandic (is)</entry><entry>ISO-8859-1</entry></row>
<row><entry>Italian (it)</entry><entry>ISO-8859-1</entry></row>
<row><entry>Dutch (nl)</entry><entry>ISO-8859-1</entry></row>
<!-- BUG: "no" is deprecated, should use "nb" or "nn" and symlinks -->
<row><entry>Norwegian (no)</entry><entry>ISO-8859-1</entry></row>
<!-- END BUG -->
<row><entry>Portuguese (pt)</entry><entry>ISO-8859-1</entry></row>
<row><entry>Swedish (sv)</entry><entry>ISO-8859-1</entry></row>
<!-- Languages below require patched groff -->
<row><entry>Czech (cs)</entry><entry>ISO-8859-2</entry></row>
<row><entry>Croatian (hr)</entry><entry>ISO-8859-2</entry></row>
<row><entry>Hungarian (hu)</entry><entry>ISO-8859-2</entry></row>
<row><entry>Japanese (ja)</entry><entry>EUC-JP</entry></row>
<row><entry>Korean (ko)</entry><entry>EUC-KR</entry></row>
<row><entry>Polish (pl)</entry><entry>ISO-8859-2</entry></row>
<row><entry>Russian (ru)</entry><entry>KOI8-R</entry></row>
<row><entry>Slovak (sk)</entry><entry>ISO-8859-2</entry></row>
<row><entry>Turkish (tr)</entry><entry>ISO-8859-9</entry></row>
</tbody>
</tgroup>
</table>

<note><para>Manual pages in languages not in the list are not supported.
Norwegian doesn't work now because of the transition from no_NO to nb_NO
locale, and Korean is non-functional because of the incomplete Groff patch.
</para></note>

<para>If upstream distributes the manual pages in the same encoding as
Man-DB expects, the manual pages can be copied to
<filename class="directory">/usr/share/man/<replaceable>[language code]</replaceable></filename>.
E.g., French manual pages
(<ulink url="http://ccb.club.fr/man/man-fr-1.58.0.tar.bz2"/>)
can be installed with the following command:</para>

<screen role="nodump"><userinput>mkdir -p /usr/share/man/fr &amp;&amp;
cp -rv man? /usr/share/man/fr</userinput></screen>

<para>If upstream distributes manual pages in UTF-8 (i.e., <quote>for RedHat</quote>)
instead of the encoding listed in the table above, they have to be
converted from UTF-8 to the encoding listed in the table before
installation. E.g., Spanish manual pages
(<ulink url="http://ditec.um.es/~piernas/manpages-es/man-pages-es-1.55.tar.bz2"/>)
can be installed with the following commands:</para>

<screen role="nodump"><userinput>mkdir -p /usr/share/man/es &amp;&amp;
find man? -type f | grep -v 'man7/iso_8859-7.7' | \
while read F ; do
	iconv -f UTF-8 -t ISO-8859-1 $F >tmp ; mv tmp $F
done &amp;&amp;
cp -rv man? /usr/share/man/es</userinput></screen>

<note>The need to exclude the <filename>man7/iso_8859-7.7</filename> file
from the conversion process because it is already in ISO-8859-1 is a packaging
bug in man-pages-es-1.55. Future versions should not require this workaround.</note>

</sect2>

<sect2 id="contents-man-db" role="content"><title>Contents of Man-DB</title>

<segmentedlist>
<segtitle>Installed programs</segtitle>
<seglistitem><seg>accessdb, apropos, catman, lexgrog, man, mandb, manpath,
and whatis</seg></seglistitem>
</segmentedlist>

<variablelist><bridgehead renderas="sect3">Short Descriptions</bridgehead>
<?dbfo list-presentation="list"?>
<?dbhtml list-presentation="table"?>


<varlistentry id="accessdb">
<term><command>accessdb</command></term>
<listitem>
<para>Dumps the <command>whatis</command> database contents in human-readable form</para>
<indexterm zone="ch-system-man-db accessdb"><primary sortas="b-accessdb">accessdb</primary></indexterm>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>

<varlistentry id="apropos">
<term><command>apropos</command></term>
<listitem>
<para>Searches the <command>whatis</command> database and displays the short descriptions
of system commands that contain a given string</para>
<indexterm zone="ch-system-man-db apropos"><primary sortas="b-apropos">apropos</primary></indexterm>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>

<varlistentry id="catman">
<term><command>catman</command></term>
<listitem>
<para>Creates or updates the pre-formatted manual pages</para>
<indexterm zone="ch-system-man-db catman"><primary sortas="b-catman">catman</primary></indexterm>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>

<varlistentry id="lexgrog">
<term><command>lexgrog</command></term>
<listitem>
<para>Displays one-line summary information about a given manual page</para>
<indexterm zone="ch-system-man-db lexgrog"><primary sortas="b-lexgrog">lexgrog</primary></indexterm>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>

<varlistentry id="man">
<term><command>man</command></term>
<listitem>
<para>Formats and displays the requested manual page</para>
<indexterm zone="ch-system-man-db man"><primary sortas="b-man">man</primary></indexterm>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>

<varlistentry id="mandb">
<term><command>mandb</command></term>
<listitem>
<para>Creates or updates the <command>whatis</command> database</para>
<indexterm zone="ch-system-man-db mandb"><primary sortas="b-mandb">mandb</primary></indexterm>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>

<varlistentry id="whatis">
<term><command>whatis</command></term>
<listitem>
<para>Searches the <command>whatis</command> database and displays the short descriptions
of system commands that contain the given keyword as a separate
word</para>
<indexterm zone="ch-system-man-db whatis"><primary sortas="b-whatis">whatis</primary></indexterm>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
</variablelist>

</sect2>

</sect1>