man-db 2.6.5 (27 June 2013)
===========================
Major changes since man-db 2.6.4:
Fixes:
------
o man's --warnings option works again on systems with versions of
groff that support it (broken in 2.6.4).
o man automatically falls back to C.UTF-8 and then en_GB.UTF-8 if
trying to find a UTF-8 locale on a system without
/usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED.
man-db 2.6.4 (23 June 2013)
===========================
Major changes since man-db 2.6.3:
Fixes:
------
o man(1) and catman(8) now document the default section list set at
configure time.
o Build fixes for Automake 1.13.
o man-db 2.6.0 arranged to search the full manpath when expanding
.so directives in manual pages (so that ".so name.1" works as well
as ".so man1/name.1"), but this incorrectly did not take effect
for manual pages that consist only of a .so directive. This is
now fixed.
Improvements:
-------------
o The MANLESS environment variable is now treated as if it were a
default value for the -r option to man: occurrences of the text
"$MAN_PN" are expanded, and explicitly using the -r option
overrides the default.
o The (unfortunately still hardcoded) maximum length for paths to
manual page hierarchies in the configuration file is now 511
characters rather than 49.
o MANPATH entries now undergo glob(7)-style wildcard expansion,
allowing entries such as "/opt/*/man".
man-db 2.6.3 (17 September 2012)
================================
Major changes since man-db 2.6.2:
Fixes:
------
o Build fixes for glibc 2.16 and Automake 1.12.
man-db 2.6.2 (18 June 2012)
===========================
Major changes since man-db 2.6.1:
Fixes:
------
o apropos prints an error message and returns non-zero when it finds
no matches. (Regression introduced in 2.5.1.)
o The presence of a 64-bit GDBM database on the manpath no longer
causes a 32-bit man process to exit with a fatal error.
Improvements:
-------------
o apropos is much faster when run with many arguments.
o whatis may be given the full path to an executable as an argument,
in which case it will look up the base name of that executable in
the appropriate parts of the manpath.
man-db 2.6.1 (14 February 2012)
===============================
Major changes since man-db 2.6.0.2:
Fixes:
------
o --with-db=db* and --with-db=ndbm compile again.
o Translated manual pages are no longer displayed starting with a
spurious blank line.
o straycats tries to ensure that col is invoked with LC_CTYPE set to
a UTF-8 locale.
o Fix double-free in mandb when encountering a symlink outside the
manual hierarchy, thanks to Peter Schiffer.
Improvements:
-------------
o mandb creates a cache directory tag, per
http://www.brynosaurus.com/cachedir/ ("Cache Directory Tagging
Standard").
o Add support for Lzip-compressed manual pages, thanks to Matias A.
Fonzo.
o Running 'man -w' (with a new --path alias) without a name now
prints the manpath, for compatibility with other man
implementations. The vim viewdoc plugin makes use of this.
man-db 2.6.0.2 (13 April 2011)
==============================
Major changes since man-db 2.6.0.1:
Fixes:
------
o Fix a segfault when scanning links to empty pages.
o Once we've seen at least one record in a page's NAME section,
ignore any further records that don't include a whatis
description, as they tend to be noise.
man-db 2.6.0.1 (10 April 2011)
==============================
Major changes since man-db 2.6.0:
Fixes:
------
o Ensure that the target of a symlink or .so chain is always recorded
as a real page.
o Read a user-specified configuration file even if HOME is unset.
man-db 2.6.0 (9 April 2011)
===========================
Major changes since man-db 2.5.9:
Fixes:
------
o Fix build with versions of GNU ld that default to
--no-copy-dt-needed-entries.
o Fix failure to display manual pages in some encodings when
installed setuid.
o Wrap long table cells in man(1), fixing test failures with groff
1.21.
o If an explicit section is passed to man, then pages that match
that section exactly will be preferred over pages that only have
that section as a prefix.
o Fix a segfault when 'man -K' tries to display certain pages.
o Fix a segfault in some situations when processes are killed by
SIGHUP, SIGINT, or SIGTERM.
Improvements:
-------------
o As promised in the release notes for man-db 2.5.8, man-db no
longer ships its own copy of libpipeline
(http://libpipeline.nongnu.org/). You must build and install that
library separately.
o Search the full manpath when expanding .so directives in manual
pages. As part of this, '.so name.1' should now work as well as
'.so man1/name.1'.
o lexgrog handles roff named glyphs and perldoc strings in NAME
sections.
o man no longer starts a pager if standard output is not a tty.
o The -s option to whatis and apropos now takes a colon- or
comma-separated list of sections, similar to 'man -S'.
o mandb error output is neater when stderr is not a terminal.
o Add basic support for the implementation of nroff/troff in the
Heirloom Documentation Tools. Title lengths are not properly set
as yet, and many features are untested.
o mandb removes cat* and NLS subdirectories of cat directories whose
corresponding man directories no longer exist.
o mandb forces SIGPIPE back to its default disposition on startup,
to avoid noisy output in case it was started in a context where
SIGPIPE was ignored.
o SECTION entries in a user configuration file now override those in
the system configuration file, rather than appending to them.
o The default less prompt now includes "(press h for help or q to
quit)" to help novices find their way around.
o man-db may now be built to use Berkeley DB version 5
(--with-db=db5).
man-db 2.5.9 (17 November 2010)
===============================
Major changes since man-db 2.5.8:
Fixes:
------
o Fix test failures on some systems. A change made in 2.5.8 was
overly sensitive to directory ordering.
o Configuring with --disable-nls works again.
man-db 2.5.8 (15 November 2010)
===============================
Major changes since man-db 2.5.7:
Fixes:
------
o Fix assertion failure on 'man -l' with an uncompressed page and
any of --no-hyphenation, --no-justification, or a non-English
page.
o 2.5.7 introduced a regression when running catman in some locales,
most notably in the C locale: while converting the output to
UTF-8, iconv was run after the compressor rather than before it.
This release fixes that.
Improvements:
-------------
o Add support for XZ-compressed manual pages, thanks to Darren Salt.
o Try underscore-separated subpages as well as hyphen-separated
ones, thanks to Tanguy Ortolo.
o Build libman and libmandb as shared libraries, reducing installed
footprint by about 200K (at least on GNU/Linux).
o libintl is no longer shipped with man-db. If your system does not
already have GNU libintl installed and you want man-db's messages
to be translated, then please install GNU libintl separately
(http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/).
o Warnings about unrecognised locales are now suppressed if the
DPKG_RUNNING_VERSION environment variable is set (i.e. man-db is
running within a Debian package's maintainer script), since the
system locales are often out of sync with the C library in that
context. Thanks to the Debian Perl maintainers for the idea.
o Allow building with an external libpipeline
(http://libpipeline.nongnu.org/), which has been split out from
man-db. This is a transitional measure: a future version of
man-db will stop shipping its own copy of libpipeline.
o mandb should no longer repeatedly rescan manual page hierarchies
when a whatis entry turns into a broken link.
man-db 2.5.7 (16 February 2010)
===============================
Major changes since man-db 2.5.6:
Fixes:
------
o If a subprocess exits before man manages to read all the output
from it, it now drains the output file descriptor rather than
immediately discarding it.
o If /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED is available, man attempts to use it
to ensure that LC_CTYPE is set to an appropriate locale for the
selected character set when invoking col. This fixes 'LANG=C man
-E UTF-8', as used by lintian.
o Don't run tests if cross-compiling.
o Fix possible mandb crash when MAN_MUST_CREATE is unset.
Improvements:
-------------
o man can now tell nroff to disable justification if the
--no-justification option is used.
o If the full path to an executable is given as an argument, man
will try looking up the corresponding manual page in the
appropriate part of the manpath, rather than just trying to format
the text of the executable as a manual page.
o In the GNU manual hierarchy layout, search man<sec><ext>
directories as well as just man<sec> (e.g. /usr/share/man/man3p as
well as /usr/share/man/man3).
o By request, man now prefers getting a page from the best manual
section over getting a page in the correct language.
o All programs now support a MAN_DEBUG environment variable which
can be used in place of the -d/--debug option. This is useful in
some situations where a program is being called deep in a process
tree.
o man-db now builds with heirloom-doctools, thanks to Diego Pettenò
of Gentoo.
o Add support for emulating pipe() with socketpair(), which is
faster on some systems; thanks to Werner Fink of SUSE.
o Cat pages are now always saved in UTF-8, and converted to the
proper encoding at display time, which means that cat pages can
now be saved regardless of locale. Note that a consequence of this
is that cat pages now include formatting information (e.g.
overstriking) and need to be run through col(1) before display.
man-db 2.5.6 (26 August 2009)
=============================
Major changes since man-db 2.5.5:
Fixes:
------
o Exact-section database lookups were incorrectly returning all
database entries whose section names were prefixes of the
requested section name. In some cases this could confuse mandb
into never believing that the database was up to date.
o Fix handling of pages with comma-separated names ("foo, bar,
baz") in their NAME sections, broken by a change in 2.5.0 (!)
to ignore manual page names containing spaces.
o Fixed a buffer overflow in the pipeline library's line-reading
functions. I don't believe this to be exploitable: at worst we
might believe that there's some garbage at the end of manual pages
(whose contents are untrusted anyway) and this bug typically
resulted in a failed assertion the next time anything tried to
read a line.
o Plugged two substantial memory leaks in the pipeline library.
o whatis and apropos only display any given manual page, or pointers
to it, once.
o man now sets less(1)'s environment up correctly for manual pages
encoded in CP1251.
o manconv no longer confuses situations such as "this UTF-8
character is not representable in the target encoding" with "this
text is not in UTF-8".
Improvements:
-------------
o The default configuration file now includes section 0, used on
some systems to document C library header files.
o 'make check' now passes in the presence of a UTF-8-aware col, such
as that in util-linux-ng.
o The 'man -K' option is now supported to search the full text of
all manual pages. This was inspired by a similar option in the
other man package (currently at version 1.6f) currently maintained
by Federico Lucifredi and formerly by Andries Brouwer, but I took
advantage of man-db's pipeline library to implement it entirely
in-process, without having to start a separate grep process for
every manual page. In my tests with fairly typical searches across
variously all manual pages or just one section, man-db's
implementation ran between 3 and 10 times faster.
o Database directories are now only created when there are
corresponding manual page directories, not just because they're
mentioned in the configuration file.
o By default, man will now try to interpret pairs of manual page
names given on the command line as equivalent to a single manual
page name containing a hyphen (e.g. 'man foo bar' => foo-bar(1)).
This supports the common pattern of programs that implement a
number of subcommands, allowing them to provide manual pages for
each that can be accessed using similar syntax as would be used to
invoke the subcommands themselves. Suggested by H. Peter Anvin,
Federico Lucifredi, and others on the git mailing list.
o The build process is now quieter by default. Use './configure
--disable-silent-rules' or 'make V=0' if you don't like this or
your make(1) doesn't support the non-standard extension required.
o 'make install' now installs the manual.
o manconv understands a wider range of Emacs-style coding tags.
o Recommendations to change MAN_DB_CREATES, MAN_DB_UPDATES, and
MAN_CATS #define options in manconfig.h have been replaced by new
configure options --enable-automatic-create,
--disable-automatic-update, and --disable-cats respectively. Note
that automatic user database creation is now off by default, as it
is often too slow for the usefulness it adds; use
--enable-automatic-create to enable it.
man-db 2.5.5 (14 March 2009)
============================
Major changes since man-db 2.5.4:
Fixes:
------
o Pages that declare a non-default encoding in their preprocessor
lines are now handled correctly.
o Fix an uninitialised variable when sorting manual page candidates
that could lead to excessive memory allocation and possible
crashes.
Improvements:
-------------
o man-db's 'make check' now tests that all its own manual pages
format without errors or warnings from groff, to ensure a
better-quality release.
man-db 2.5.4 (24 February 2009)
===============================
Major changes since man-db 2.5.3:
Fixes:
------
o Build fixes for systems without GNU Make, and for systems without
gettext; this successfully covers at least FreeBSD.
o The distclean target now works if po4a isn't installed.
o Exit as soon as possible if database writes return ENOSPC.
o lexgrog now stops on any unrecognised roff request, rather than
continuing and often littering the database with garbage.
o man no longer requires both standard input and standard output to
be terminals in order to use the terminal line length. The line
length from standard output is preferred if available.
o The manpath was built completely wrongly when multiple entries
were present in LANGUAGE: duplicates were handled strangely, and
languages were effectively iterated in reverse order. It should be
rather more sensible now.
Improvements:
-------------
o The MAN_KEEP_STDERR environment variable can now be used to
override man's default of discarding stderr when stdout is a
terminal.
o Handling of terminal widths for cat pages is now configurable,
using the MINCATWIDTH, MAXCATWIDTH, and CATWIDTH configuration
file directives.
o 'man -a' now detects duplicate manual page candidates more
reliably, and sorts them better.
o Belarusian, Estonian, Greek, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian,
Romanian, Slovenian, and Ukrainian pages are now supported.
o man can now search for pages using regular expressions (with
--regex) or shell wildcards (with --wildcard). By default this
searches both page names and descriptions, like apropos, but if
the --names-only option is used then it searches page names only,
like whatis.
o man can now tell nroff to disable hyphenation if the
--no-hyphenation option is used.
o man-db already searched for manual pages in ../man and man
directories relative to each $PATH component; it now searches in
../share/man and share/man directories too.
o Groff 1.20 was recently released, including the 'preconv'
preprocessor. Although man-db has supported preconv to some extent
since 2.4.4, man-db's configure now detects its presence and
infers that groff supports Unicode input using it; man also now
takes slightly better advantage of preconv than before.
o Per-locale groff macros are now loaded if possible, allowing us to
take advantage of such things as localised versions of predefined
strings and language-aware hyphenation. This only works with Groff
1.20.2 or better (not yet released), since earlier versions did
not allow us to suppress warnings in the event that the
appropriate macro file is not available.
man-db 2.5.3 (17 November 2008)
===============================
Major changes since man-db 2.5.2:
Fixes:
------
o Cleaned up a number of possible crashes, memory leaks, and missing
error checks found by the Coverity Scan project.
o Fix build if MAN_CATS is undefined.
o If the LINGUAS environment variable is set while running
configure, it now controls building and installation of localised
manual pages as well as program translations.
o The LANGUAGE environment variable is now tokenised properly,
rather than only taking the first two characters of each element.
o Fix build if --disable-nls is used or iconv is not available.
o man now correctly propagates the exit code of whatis or apropos
when called with the -f or -k option respectively.
Improvements:
-------------
o A number of inconsistencies and readability problems with man-db's
own manual pages have been cleaned up, thanks mainly to Yuri
Kozlov.
o Reduce the number of warnings emitted when using an unrecognised
locale.
o manconv and zsoelim are now called internally rather than by
executing external programs, to improve performance.
o man-db now uses GDBM (--with-db=gdbm) in preference to Berkeley DB
(--with-db=db or --with-db=dbN where N is 1, 2, 3, or 4) by
default, since hardware improvements have rendered Berkeley DB's
speed advantages negligible for our purposes and the relatively
frequent SONAME and on-disk format changes are not worth the
hassle. Distributors should note that if they follow this change
then they will need to arrange for databases to be rebuilt on
upgrade to this version.
o Manual pages may now be compressed with LZMA (although this is
probably only worth it for very large pages).
o Duplicate manual page hierarchies due to symlinks (e.g. /usr/man
-> /usr/share/man) are detected and removed from the search order.
o A locale modifier (e.g. @latin) in a directory name must now match
the locale if the former is set, in addition to the language and
territory.
o Bare .so includes (e.g. ".so foo.1" rather than ".so man1/foo.1")
now work, although only within the same manual page hierarchy for
now.
man-db 2.5.2 (5 May 2008)
=========================
Major changes since man-db 2.5.1:
Fixes:
------
o 'man -H' (without a browser argument) was completely broken in
2.5.1 and is now fixed.
o man no longer breaks in Japanese locales when using less as a
pager.
Improvements:
-------------
o The --encoding option to man can now take a true character
encoding rather than a *roff device; the latter was an unreliable,
inflexible, and awkward way to select an output encoding. The old
semantics are still supported for backward compatibility.
o Whatis parsing stops at .ie or .if conditionals.
o CJK locale specifications where the codeset component is
equivalent to but not stringwise-identical to UTF-8 (e.g.
zh_CN.utf8) are handled better.
o man(1)'s OPTIONS section is ordered more comprehensibly.
o apropos, lexgrog, man, mandb, and whatis ignore encoding
conversion errors for the last possible encoding of the source
page. This helps, for example, with pages including misencoded
non-ASCII names of authors; it usually seems better to allow these
pages to pass with small errors than to break them entirely.
man-db 2.5.1 (28 January 2008)
==============================
Major changes since man-db 2.5.0:
Fixes:
------
o The manual is now built automatically, avoiding some ordering
problems on 'make distclean'.
o Manual pages are converted to the proper input encoding for troff
output as well as nroff output.
o The -t, -T, -X, and -Z options to man work again; in 2.5.0, they
read input from stdin rather than from the manual page.
o apropos and whatis no longer segfault when given an explicit
locale using -L.
o man now understands that groff's ascii device takes ASCII input,
not ISO-8859-1.
o man no longer discards stderr when writing to a file or a pipe;
this was broken by an overenthusiastic change in 2.5.0.
o manconv now falls back to the next encoding in its list if any
characters in an entire 64KB block fail to decode using the
current encoding, as was originally intended.
o manconv is more careful about extracting coding: directives from
manual pages.
o Ctrl-C and Ctrl-\ now work again at the prompt issued by 'man -a'.
Improvements:
-------------
o There is a new --with-sections configure option to change the
default value of SECTION in the configuration file.
o Automake is now used to generate Makefiles. Among other things,
this fixes VPATH builds and some bugs in dependency generation,
and should allow building with non-GNU versions of make.
o man-db now uses the Gnulib portability library, allowing the
removal of earlier haphazard portability code. While this results
in a somewhat larger source distribution, it makes man-db easier
to maintain and should make it easier to build on systems to which
the maintainer does not have access.
o In the process of switching to Gnulib, the last vestiges of
pre-C89 support have been removed; they were documented to be
broken anyway.
o If the MANROFFOPT environment variable is set, man now appends its
value to the *roff command line.
o man now accepts a --recode option to output a source manual page
converted to a specified encoding.
o For compatibility with System V, man accepts -s as an alias for
-S, and permits sections to be comma-separated as well as
colon-separated.
o All programs, except the obsolete 'wrapper', now accept a --debug
option. (accessdb, lexgrog, and zsoelim were lacking it.)
o man now accepts a --warnings option to enable groff warnings.
man-db 2.5.0 (7 October 2007)
=============================
Major changes since man-db 2.4.4:
Fixes:
------
o mandb --quiet now suppresses several more warnings.
o The output of apropos no longer includes duplicates when multiple
search terms are used.
Improvements:
-------------
o Databases are now created for non-English manual hierarchies. All
database entries should be encoded in UTF-8; man-db converts from
the character set of the manual hierarchy and to the character set
specified in the user's locale as necessary.
o Per-locale directory handling has been improved. Directories such
as "fr.UTF-8" may be used for occasions when it is appropriate to
specify the character set but not the country, and so a full
locale name is inconvenient.
o There is a new "manconv" program which can try multiple possible
encodings for a file, thus allowing UTF-8 manual pages to be
installed in any directory even without an explicit encoding
declaration.
o A decompression library is now in place. This allows man-db to use
zlib to decompress gzipped files, and allows most of its uses of
temporary files to be removed. The only remaining exceptions are
cat file creation (which uses a temporary file in the cat tree
rather than in /tmp) and viewing HTML manual pages (which uses a
temporary directory). Otherwise, man-db should now work fine even
with a read-only /tmp during system recovery.
o Cat pages are now saved in the background while the pager is
active, so man will only need to block afterwards if the pager is
exited very quickly.
o --with-* options are now available at configure time for most of
the auxiliary program locations that you might want to override.
o man now supports the MANPAGER environment variable, overriding
PAGER.
o apropos/whatis output is now truncated to the terminal width by
default. As with man, this may be overridden using the MANWIDTH
environment variable.
o lexgrog now ignores alleged manual page names containing spaces,
as these usually indicate parsing errors or ill-formed NAME
sections and they clutter up apropos output badly. I'm only aware
of one legitimate counterexample, the Intercal compiler "oo, ick",
which no longer appears to be known by that name anyway; let me
know if there are any others.
o man now discards stderr from formatting subprocesses when
outputting to a pager, to avoid visual corruption from any error
messages.
o If the MAN_KEEP_FORMATTING environment variable is set to any
non-empty value, then man will preserve formatting characters in
its output even when standard output is not a terminal. This may
be useful for programs such as pinfo that call man and can
interpret its formatted output.
o Setting NOCACHE in the configuration file now prevents man from
ever creating cat pages automatically.
o apropos now accepts the --and option to display only items that
match all the supplied keywords.
man-db 2.4.4 (12 February 2007)
===============================
Major changes since man-db 2.4.3:
man-db is now revision-controlled using bzr
(http://bazaar-vcs.org/). See docs/HACKING for the location of the
archive (including all CVS history, imported by Canonical).
Fixes:
------
o SECURITY: Fix a buffer overrun if using -H and the designated web
browser (argument to -H or $BROWSER) contains multiple %s
expansions. This is CVE-2006-4250.
o Ignore SIGINT and SIGQUIT while running subprocesses, so that
typing Ctrl-C doesn't kill less (broken in 2.4.3).
o Similarly, ignore SIGPIPE in subprocesses.
o Various fixes to SIGCHLD handling in pipeline library, preventing
"waitpid failed: No child processes" errors.
o Skip "exec" in configuration file commands (perhaps left over from
old installations), which the pipeline execution library cannot
handle directly.
Improvements:
-------------
o Add support for Chinese in the --enable-mb-groff case.
o lexgrog now handles pages with multiple descriptions more
usefully, by displaying one description per output line.
man-db 2.4.3 (3 July 2005)
==========================
Major changes since man-db 2.4.2:
Fixes:
------
o Avoid problems creating databases on systems with badly broken
clocks set before the Unix epoch.
o Fix detection of decompression programs, so that man doesn't
attempt to execute man pages when it doesn't have a corresponding
decompression program.
Improvements:
-------------
o apropos and whatis now accept a --section option to restrict their
search to a particular manual section.
o The pipeline execution library is now used for most calls to
external programs, avoiding use of the shell.
o When stdout is not a terminal, man pages will be formatted in
plain text without the use of backspace or ANSI formatting
characters.
o When invoking apropos (man -k) or whatis (man -f) as external
programs, man now only passes through command-line options
understood by the respective programs.
o Improve handling of locales with versions and/or modifiers.
o Add support for Croatian, Galician, Indonesian, Slovak, and
Turkish pages.
o man-db may now be built to use Berkeley DB version 4
(--with-db=db4).
Compatibility notes:
--------------------
o Setting the line length of manual pages now requires groff 1.18 or
later.
man-db 2.4.2 (20 September 2003)
================================
Major changes since man-db 2.4.1:
Fixes:
------
o SECURITY: Fix a number of buffer overruns in configuration file
handling, ultimate source location, and MANPATH processing. This
is CVE CAN-2003-0620.
o SECURITY: Restrict the use of the DEFINE directive in ~/.manpath
to code running with dropped privilege. Previously, the
'compressor' variable could be used to run arbitrary code with
raised privilege. This is CVE CAN-2003-0645.
o Make sure to initialize mandata structures to zero. The uses of
uninitialized memory resulting from this had been leading to
random segfaults.
o Drop privileges in order to be able to read pages in
non-world-readable user manpaths while setuid.
o man can be built with --disable-setuid again.
o man's locale support has been revamped. The encoding of source
manual pages is no longer related to the encoding of the input
passed to *roff or to *roff's terminal output device. These
frequently differ, especially in UTF-8 locales but in other
circumstances as well, and a "just send 8-bit data" approach is no
longer adequate. If you are using a version of groff with the
Debian multibyte patch applied, pass the --enable-mb-groff option
to configure.
o When using GDBM, accessdb and apropos did not return database
entries in sorted order, since GDBM's key traversal interface is
not lexicographically ordered. The database layer has been
corrected to cope with this.
o Directories found in strange places in manual hierarchies don't
crash mandb.
Improvements:
-------------
o man now calls mandb to update databases rather than doing it
itself. This leaves cat pages as the sole remaining reason for man
to be setuid.
o The "undocumented" message is only displayed if a corresponding
executable is found on the $PATH.
o All programs that read ~/.manpath now take a -C option to cause
them to read a different user configuration file instead.
o The --enable-debug option to configure has been removed. man-db's
Makefiles now always calculate full dependencies for C files.
o mandb caches the contents of directories, significantly speeding
up the purging of obsolete entries.
o mandb now knows how to purge database entries corresponding to
removed stray cat pages.
In addition, a pipeline execution library has been written, which
will make it possible to eliminate all or almost all use of the
shell in a future release. Unfortunately, time pressures due to the
security issues above meant that the pipeline library was not well
enough tested for use in this release, so it is present but unused.
That will be the first item for 2.4.3.
man-db 2.4.1 (22 December 2002)
===============================
Major changes since man-db 2.4.0:
The man-db CVS repository has moved from sourceforge.net to
savannah.nongnu.org.
Fixes:
------
o Don't enter an infinite loop when the SYSTEM environment variable
is set.
o man doesn't segfault when trying to follow a broken symlink.
o mandb no longer corrupts databases when deleting entries that are
part of multi keys.
o Prevent a possible buffer overflow when encountering large multi
keys.
o Man page names are escaped when globbing, so [(1) can now be found
even if the database is not up to date.
o Correct an access() check that led to 'man -X -l -' producing no
output.
o lexgrog can now cope with man pages containing only a .so link.
o Manual hierarchies with a specific encoding are put into the
search path in the correct order. A bug in $LANGUAGE handling had
formerly meant that 'de' would take precedence over 'de_DE.UTF-8'.
Improvements:
-------------
o man's behaviour when searching for page names that begin with a
digit has been made more intuitive, as has its treatment of
section names that are extensions of ones mentioned in the
configuration file but are not themselves explicitly named as
sections.
o The default line length for pages formatted for terminal output
has been increased (reducing margin size) to match the default in
groff 1.18.
o Proofread the manual.
o The -w flag to man has been changed to display the name of only
the source nroff file. A -W flag has been introduced which
displays the name of the cat file as well. If both flags are given
to man, it will behave as before.
o If bzip2 is installed, pages compressed with bzip2 can now be
displayed.
o Add support for displaying an additional message when no man page
is found, which can be used to direct users to a generic
"undocumented" page.
o The manual hierarchy layout will now be guessed where possible if
an explicit --enable-mandirs argument is not passed to configure.
man-db 2.4.0 (26 June 2002)
===========================
Major changes since man_db-2.3.20:
I have changed the package name to man-db, as the underscore was
awkward.
Upgrading from version 2.3.x:
-----------------------------
The database format has changed slightly, so you will need to run
'mandb --create' after installing the new version to rebuild your
databases from scratch. (Distribution packages should do this
automatically for system databases.)
Fixes:
------
o The GNU nroff test in configure now works when /bin/sh is ash.
o When scanning pages for NAME sections, lexgrog and mandb no longer
accidentally eat the line after each occurrence of the no-op
request '.'.
o 'man --local' drops privileges throughout to avoid problems with
non-world-readable home directories.
o Newly created cat directories are chowned to the man user when
running as root.
o 'man --html' no longer creates its temporary file with raised
privileges, so that it now works with a setuid man.
o man detects preprocessors correctly when setuid.
o Various segfault fixes: explicitly null-terminate data returned by
the Berkeley DB library to avoid some rare crashes; don't reuse a
freed pointer in some cases of pages with multiple names; handle
MANPATHs containing '::' more safely.
o Correctly parse manual pages using DOS line-ending conventions.
o Work around a misfeature in Berkeley DB: it pauses for several
seconds if asked to read a zero-length database, on the assumption
that somebody is still writing the metadata page. man is generally
better off just ignoring the database in this case.
o Work around corrupted databases in the case where the nextkey
pointer chain contains a loop.
Improvements:
-------------
o man looks in the filesystem followed by the database, rather than
the other way round. Unix filesystems are quite good databases for
this purpose, and the man database is only superior when looking
up names that don't have associated links in the filesystem.
o 'apropos --wildcard --exact' makes sure wildcards match an entire
description or page name, unlike 'apropos --wildcard' which may
match on word boundaries too.
o man's page-searching code has been substantially rearranged, and
now only starts displaying pages when it has finished searching
for candidates. This allows pages to be sorted more sensibly.
o Manual pages are formatted in UTF-8 if that is the current
locale's character set. The -E option is now available to force a
particular encoding. Note that some versions of (e.g.) less have
problems displaying UTF-8 in conjunction with backspace
characters; groff 1.18 should alleviate this by using ANSI colour
escapes instead.
o The less prompt string sets -PM as well as -Pm.
o Invoking man from within less now sets the correct page title in
the inner less.
o Unless the --match-case option is used, man will search for pages
case-insensitively.
o Update the mechanism for setting the line length so that it also
works with groff 1.18.
o The -R switch is added to the less prompt string, which is needed
to display the ANSI colour escapes generated by groff 1.18
correctly.
o The $MANLESS environment variable may be used to override the
normal creation of the less prompt string.
o Translation updates for French, German, and Spanish, and a new
Catalan translation. See man/THANKS.
man_db-2.3.20 (7 September 2001)
================================
Major changes since man_db-2.3.19:
Fixes:
------
o A typo in 2.3.19 caused character sets for many languages to be
detected incorrectly. This especially affected multibyte
languages.
o Long options in the environment variable LESS are handled
correctly.
o When checking if cat pages need to be updated, check for different
timestamps rather than whether the cat page is newer, as otherwise
we were confused by tools like tar that preserve timestamps in
their archives. Each cat page is now set to have the same mtime as
its corresponding man page.
o Look up the correct character set each time a page is displayed
rather than just the first time, in case pages in several
different character sets are viewed in a single session.
o groff requests are no longer assumed to be case-insensitive when
scanning for preprocessors, so for example mdoc's .Eq request
isn't mistaken for the .EQ which introduces eqn commands.
o Escape arguments passed to the shell that might contain dangerous
characters.
o Avoid an infinite loop if the LANGUAGE environment variable is set
but empty.
o The --create option to mandb now implies --no-purge.
o Temporary files are handled with more secure permissions.
Improvements:
-------------
o Use a variant of mkstemp() rather than tempnam(), to avoid classic
race conditions. (I don't believe the races were usefully
exploitable.)
o Tolerate whatis entries in a database that point to themselves.
o Detect more translations of the NAME section.
o Add examples of man pages written in POD and SGML.
o lexgrog is now installed in /usr/bin by default, with proper
argument parsing, an improved output format, and a man page. It is
expected to be used by programs that need to validate man pages.
o The -H (--html) option to man is now compiled in by default, and
supports the BROWSER specification (as documented at
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/BROWSER/ and amended at
http://www.dwheeler.com/browse/secure_browser.html).
man_db-2.3.19 (5 July 2001)
===========================
Major changes since man_db-2.3.18:
Fixes:
------
o The user configuration file ~/.manpath is no longer trusted when
deciding whether to drop privileges. In the process, user cat
directory handling has been improved.
o Commands of the form 'man -S "" foo' formerly emptied the list of
acceptable sections and then searched the database anyway, and
commands of the form 'man -S ::: foo' segfaulted. Both now use the
standard list of sections.
o The HUP and TERM signals are now handled better.
o straycats processing invokes 'col -bx' rather than 'col-bx'.
o The root user is now correctly allowed to update databases in
system manpaths.
o apropos and whatis no longer enter infinite recursion if a
database contains an entry pointing to itself.
Improvements:
-------------
o When compiled with --enable-setuid, man and mandb can be installed
non-setuid. In this mode, they will be unable to write cat pages
in system directories or to modify system databases, but will
otherwise operate correctly. This allows a single binary package
to support setuid and non-setuid modes of operation.
o The ordering of manual sections is read from SECTION directives in
the configuration file rather than being hard-coded.
o The MANDB_MAP configuration file directive is documented more
clearly.
o Multiple whatis entries separated by commas, break requests,
and/or paragraph requests are handled more intelligently.
o Fill control requests (.nf and .fi) cause lexgrog to assume a
break at each newline.
o Duplicate manpath entries (often generated in the course of
national language support) are removed, so that 'man -a' works
better.
o man_db's binaries are installed unstripped by default.
o Since supporting certain layouts of manual page hierarchies causes
problems for others, the layout is now selectable via configure.
The default is to try all layouts.
o man only does an on-the-fly update of the database caches when the
--update option is given.
o Manual pages are displayed with a line length appropriate to the
current terminal. If a non-standard line length is used (i.e. the
terminal is not between 66 and 80 characters wide) then cat pages
will not be saved.
o mandb tries to purge obsolete entries from its databases. Using
the --create flag should now usually only be necessary in cases of
database corruption.
man_db-2.3.18 (14 May 2001)
===========================
Major changes since man_db-2.3.11:
man_db-2.3.18 is an interim release under new maintenance by Colin
Watson, merging much of the work done by former maintainers (Graeme
Wilford and Fabrizio Polacco). It incorporates several years of
changes made in the Debian GNU/Linux distribution's package of
man_db.
Here are a few highlights, with the names of the maintainers
responsible for them. As I am documenting after the fact of other
people's changes of a few years ago, I have undoubtedly missed a
number of fixes and improvements; I promise to keep track of these
as I go along in future.
Fixes:
------
o Multiple security fixes, including better handling of temporary
files, a format string vulnerability fix, and more careful
dropping of privileges when running setuid. [Fabrizio, Colin]
o Databases no longer disappear temporarily while they are being
regenerated. [Fabrizio]
o Corrected handling of locale environment variables. Setting
several colon-separated locales in $LANGUAGE also works now.
[Colin]
o whatis and apropos are more careful about the possibility of a
corrupted database. [Fabrizio, Colin]
Improvements:
-------------
o If root has private manual hierarchies, cat pages generated from
them are no longer chowned to a less-privileged user. [Wilf]
o Rewrote configuration file handling, adding DEFINE directives to
set paths to external programs. The configuration file is now
called man_db.conf. [Wilf]
o Support FHS paths (/usr/share/man and /var/cache/man) in
preference to FSSTND paths (/usr/man and /var/catman). [Fabrizio]
o Converted from catgets to GNU gettext for national language
support. [Fabrizio, Colin]
o Several new and improved localized message catalogues and
translated man pages. [Fabrizio, Colin, other contributors]
o Added accessdb utility, which displays the contents of a manual
page database. [Fabrizio]
o Added user configuration file ~/.manpath, with the same syntax as
the global configuration file. [Fabrizio]
o Leading or trailing colons in the MANPATH environment variable
cause the manpath derived from configuration files to be prepended
or appended respectively. A double colon in the middle of the
environment variable causes the configuration file manpath to be
inserted between the colons. [Fabrizio]
o Added experimental -H and -Thtml options to take advantage of
groff's new HTML driver. [Fabrizio]
o lexgrog now scans manual pages to guess which preprocessors are
needed. [Fabrizio]
o Create cat directories on the fly if necessary. [Fabrizio]
o Supply a wrapper which explicitly drops privileges to uid man if
man or mandb is run as root. In the future, splitting out setuid
functions into a separate helper process may remove the need for
this paranoia. [Fabrizio]
o Add --test option to mandb, which merely reports errors in manual
page hierarchies rather than actually creating or updating a
database. [Fabrizio, Colin]
o Manual pages may now be symlinks outside the mantree. This should
pose no significant security concerns, and utilities such as GNU
stow create such symlinks. [Colin]
o Deprecate whatis references for man, and display a warning if
displaying a page relies on going through a whatis reference. They
often lead to confusingly non-obviously-deterministic behaviour,
and guaranteeing that man will honour them even when the database
is out of date causes performance problems. [Colin]
man_db-2.3.11 (21 September 1995)
=================================
Major changes since man_db-2.3.10:
o The man_db manual is bundled in source form.
o Components of $PATH not in the config file were checked for
`man' subdirectories. Now they are also checked for `../man'.
o Untarring a new manual page (with a timestamp older than the
relative cat file) over the original did *not* cause man/catman
to reformat the replacement. This is changed. As a side effect,
untarring an unchanged man file over the original will also cause
a reformat.
man_db-2.3.10 (13 July 1995)
============================
Major changes since man_db-2.3.5:
Fixes:
------
o Global databases were not owned by setuid owner (if applicable).
As a consequence only mandb could update the databases unless
man was run by superuser. Stupid bug.
o The keyword passed to apropos _never_ matched the first word
of any whatis line.
o FAVOUR_STRAYCATS code (if enabled), did not work properly.
o zsoelim did not work as advertised.
Improvements:
-------------
o Man removes its temporary files upon abnormal termination.
o apropos does proper word matching rather than the fuzzy
matching of 2.3.5. eg. supplying any of the keywords:
`ld.so', `a.out', `dynamic', `linker' or `loader' will match
the following entry:
ld.so (8) - a.out dynamic linker/loader
whereas `a.out' and `loader' used to fail.
o man/whatis/apropos return with exit code 16 if manual
page/file or keyword is not matched. Previously exit code 0
was used making it difficult for callers to know if the lookup
was successful.
o addition of German message catalogue.
o `apropos' and `man -k' do POSIX specified regex matching rather
than keyword searches if the environment variable POSIXLY_CORRECT
is defined.
o added glob-only support of native system manual hierarchies
on HP-UX, OSF and Solaris operating systems. Improved the
whatis parsing code to cope with majority of HP-UX manual pages.
o ported to NeXTstep.
man_db-2.3.5 (21 April 1995)
============================
Major changes since man_db-2.2.1:
Added support for...
--------------------
o Non-standard section names i.e. multi-character
o Compressed manual pages.
A new utility `zsoelim' is included to correctly handle nroff
.so requests that point to a file which has been compressed.
o Compressed stray cats.
By definition, stray cats are not re-creatable as they have no
relative source manual page. As they may have non-default
compression extensions and may reside on read-only media,
stray cats have the same compression support as manual pages.
o FSSTND proposed `extension' support.
Specific package manual pages may be installed in the standard
sections but with a package-unique extension appended as in
exit(3tcl) - ../man/man3/exit.3tcl. Using the command
`man -e tcl exit'
would then display an exit manual page with a tcl extension, if
available. Of course, `man 3tcl exit' works as always.
o FSSTND proposed NLS man subdirectories.
Of the form .../man/<locale>/man<sec>/
o NLS message catalogue hooks.
Provision has been made for the programs to emit their messages in
a language dependent form.
o `whatis' referred manual pages.
Some manual pages contain relevant information for commands or
programs that would not otherwise reference the page.
The `whatis' part of the manual page is used to create virtual
links to these pages by all of the names mentioned within it.
Examples include names such as `.' and `:' referencing the local
shell manual page.
o Catman utility.
Used to pre-format the manual pages into cat pages.
o Operating systems other than Linux.
man_db has been reported to compile on the following platforms:
Linux, SunOS, Solaris, Ultrix, OSF, HP-UX, AIX, IRIX
(although portability does not extend to support of native
manual tree structures on some of these systems, eg. HP-UX)
o Berkeley DB library routines.
This compliments the support of both gdbm and ndbm which already
existed. DB databases may be shared across platforms.
o $MANOPTS environment variable.
The environment variable MANOPTS may be set to any string in
command line option/argument format. It is parsed by man(1) prior
to its actual command line.
o Per manual hierarchy cat directory locations.
It is possible to redirect your cat pages to other directories or
even other file systems.
o Per manual hierarchy nroff/[tg]roff format scripts.
Ability to create custom formatter scripts that are called by
man(1) to enable format/display of non-standard manual pages or
manual pages requiring a special macro package.
o Extension of `man -l'.
Arguments following -l are interpreted as local files requiring
format and display. Extensions are:
`man -l -' formats and displays stdin.
`man -l foo.1.gz' decompresses, formats and displays foo.1.gz.
o Latin1 manual pages/choice of nroff output device.
o Viewing of ASCII manual pages formatted for a latin1 output device
on a 7 bit ASCII terminal (-7).
o Whatis and apropos utilities support regex and wildcard matching.
o checkman.
Shell script utility that will find and display duplicated manual
pages found across manual page hierarchies.
o mkcatdirs.
Shell script utility to create appropriate cat directories after
installation and setup.
Conceptual improvements
-----------------------
o Replacement of single database with multiple modular db's.
Easier integration of additional information into the databases in
the future.
o Both user and global databases share the same name:
`index.<db-type>'
where <db-type> could be `bt', `db' or `pag' and `dir'.
o Databases contain `whatis' text.
Makewhatis and text whatis databases are redundant, although
whatis and apropos will use the text whatis database for information
if they cannot read from a relevant index database.
o straycats handled without need for `placeholders'.
o Friendly less(1) prompt.
If man(1) uses less(1) as its pager (dependent on both static and
dynamic factors), the prompt is modified to suit the manual page
being displayed. The modification performed is also changeable by
the user.
o man_db manual.
man_db has a manual that covers the setup, maintenance and use of
a generic online manual page system.
o Modes of operation.
The man_db utilities can be compiled with various modes of
operation in mind. Eg. man can be stopped from updating databases
and/or creating cat files in situations where security is extremely
important. See the man_db manual for details.
Speed improvements
------------------
o Background compression/saving of cat files.
Cat files are compressed and saved in the background, whilst the
user is able to browse the formatted page directly.
o Merge of straycats and makewhatis into mandb.
While mandb has slowed, it now incorporates makewhatis and straycats
functionality and is much faster as a whole. 2.0a2 used grep/awk,
2.2 used C regex and 2.3 now uses lex sourced C to strip out the
whatis information from the raw man or cat files.
o Berkeley DB support.
Provides lower database initialisation overhead as compared with
gdbm.
o Extremely fast whatis(1) searches.
whatis(1) uses keyed database lookups to retrieve whatis strings
for standard (non regex/wildcard) searches.
Fixes
-----
o Correct handling of $MANSECT.
The environment variable MANSECT is no longer ignored.
o Acknowledgement of $MANPATH order.
manpath elements are searched in the order specified.
