modprobe.conf man page has invalid symlink

Updating index cache for path `/usr/share/man/man5'. Wait...mandb: warning: /usr/share/man/man5/modprobe.d.5 is a dangling symlink

I'm pretty sure that your patch is incorrect, subscribing our resident "man" expert

Prefixing with "man5/" is actually correct even though it looks weird; .so links are relative to the base of the manual page hierarchy. However, you don't need the trailing .gz on the .so link.

A correct patch would be:

-.so modprobe.conf.5
+.so man5/modprobe.conf.5

(dh_compress will fix up the symlink correctly if you leave off the .gz)

Thanks for the feedback, attaching the corrected patch

I'm upgrading this to High as I think it currently causes mandb to rebuild the database every time. See http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/14467 for details. I'd upload this right away except I think that Scott currently has module-init-tools changes pending in the ubuntu-boot PPA and I don't want to interfere with him.

Will send this upstream next week when I see him.

After chatting with Colin, it turns out the the "other" man implementation (e.g. as used by Fedora) accepts .so links like this - so our man-db probably should too

Marking as patch-rejected following Scott's comments above.

This should no longer cause repeated rescans as of man-db 2.5.8, so downgrading severity. The rest of this is essentially Debian #503472.

I've fixed this upstream; man-db 2.6.0 will have more complete support for .so search paths.

This bug was fixed in the package man-db - 2.6.0.2-1

---------------
man-db (2.6.0.2-1) unstable; urgency=low

  * New upstream release:
    - Fix a segfault when scanning links to empty pages (closes: #622104).
    - 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.
  * Remove unnecessary .la files (closes: #622443).

man-db (2.6.0.1-1) unstable; urgency=low

  * New upstream release, fixing test failures in 2.6.0 (closes: #621867):
    - Ensure that the target of a symlink or .so chain is always recorded as
      a real page.
    - Read a user-specified configuration file even if HOME is unset.

man-db (2.6.0-1) unstable; urgency=low

  * New upstream release:
    - 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' (closes: #503472, LP: #411534).
    - Handle roff named glyphs and perldoc strings in NAME sections (closes:
      #601025).
    - Don't start a pager if stdout is not a tty.
    - Allow passing multiple sections to whatis and apropos (closes:
      #571285).
    - Provide byte positions in manconv errors (closes: #562789).
    - Make mandb error output neater when stderr is not a tty.
    - Fix failure to display manual pages in some encodings when installed
      setuid.
    - Don't ignore SIGPIPE while forking iconv (closes: #597756).
    - Remove obsolete subdirectories of cat directories (closes: #558804).
    - If mandb sees that A is a symlink to B, it should never store a whatis
      reference for B (closes: #204249).
    - Print commas in roman rather than bold (thanks, David Prévot; closes:
      #600002).
    - Consider .PD requests as paragraph breaks (closes: #611012).
    - Reset SIGPIPE to SIG_DFL on startup, to avoid noisy output in the
      event that mandb was started from a context where SIGPIPE was ignored.
    - SECTION entries in a user configuration file now override those in the
      system configuration file, rather than appending to them.
    - If the user asked for an explicit section, sort exact matches first.
    - Rewrite all remaining subprocess handling in terms of libpipeline,
      especially some crash-prone code in catman (LP: #27738).
    - The default less prompt now includes "(press h for help or q to quit)"
      to help novices find their way around
      (http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/25975).
    - Fix a segfault when 'man -K' tries to display certain pages.
    - Fix a segfault in some situations when processes are killed by SIGHUP,
      SIGINT, or SIGTERM (LP: #218336).
  * Avoid unnecessary metadata writes to /var/cache/man when doing recursive
    chown (thanks, Iustin Pop; closes: #619726).
 -- Ubuntu Archive Auto-Sync <email address hidden> Sat, 30 Apr 2011 13:16:26 +0000