Re: man.conf missing after cygwin upgrade

[Igor Pechtchanski <pechtcha at cs dot nyu dot edu>]

On Mon, 4 Jul 2005, FischRon.external wrote:

> After upgrading cygwin to the most recent version, I found that man
> pages aren't displayed anymore; for example
>
>   $ man man
>   Warning: cannot open configuration file /usr/share/misc/man.conf

That's not good...

> Then I saw that my MANPATH looks strange:
>
>   $ echo MANPATH
>   :/usr/ssl/man
>
> Note the leading column, which looks as if some part of the MANPATH has
> been cut off.

...but has nothing to do with this.  The leading colon is valid, and means
to take whatever the current man configuration says the MANPATH should be,
and *append* the content of the MANPATH variable.

> I fixed this by manually adjusting the MANPATH:
>
>   $ export MANPATH=/usr/man:/usr/share/man:/usr/ssl/man
>   $ man man
>
> Now it does display the man-page, but before this it also writes the
> aforementioned error message.

Sure it would.  You're missing a config file, and man can't forgive that.

> Next I did
>
>   $ /usr/sbin/makewhatis
>   $ man -k shell
>
> Now I get that error message *twice* (but then man -k displays an
> overview of the available shell commands, as expected). Now I checked
> /usr/share/misc and found that it has permissions 000. I chmod the
> permissions to 0777. Also I found that /usr/share/misc is empty, i.e.
> there is no file man.conf in it.

Ah, that could be the reason -- permissions 000 would make the postinstall
script fail when copying the man.conf file from its default location.  If
you haven't run setup since upgrading man, see if /var/log/setup.log.full
has any messages from /etc/postinstall/man.sh.

> I checked the man-page for man.conf, but there was no hint how this file
> usually is generated.

You should re-run /etc/postinstall/man.sh.done (or reinstall the man
package) to recreate man.conf.  This is a Cygwin-specific recipe, BTW.

> Of course I can live with this bug, since man eventually seems to do its
> job. Still I'm curious what is going wrong here. Any ideas?

Now that your /usr/share/misc has better permissions, future man upgrades
should work.  If I were you, I'd investigate *why* /usr/share/misc ended
up with 000 permissions in the first place (it's created by setup.exe
using the inherited Windows permissions -- are the ACLs on / too strict?).
What happened with man may happen much less obviously with other packages.
	Igor
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