6.45. Man-DB-2.4.4

6.45.1. Installation of Man-DB

Four adjustments need to be made to the sources of Man-DB.

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:

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

The second change is a sed substitution to delete the “/usr/man” and “/usr/local/man” lines in the man_db.conf file to prevent redundant results when using programs such as whatis:

sed -i -e '\%\t/usr/man%d' -e '\%\t/usr/local/man%d' src/man_db.conf.in

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

cat >> include/manconfig.h.in << "EOF"
#define WEB_BROWSER "exec /usr/bin/lynx"
#define COL "/usr/bin/col"
#define VGRIND "/usr/bin/vgrind"
#define GRAP "/usr/bin/grap"
EOF

The col program is a part of the Util-linux package, lynx is a text-based web browser (see BLFS for installation instructions), vgrind converts program sources to Groff input, and grap is useful for typesetting graphs in Groff documents. The vgrind and grap 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.

Finally, patch the sources to fix output errors if the man page is prematurely aborted by pressing the 'q' key.

patch -Np1 -i ../man-db-2.4.4-fixes-1.patch

Prepare Man-DB for compilation:

./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-mb-groff --disable-setuid

Compile the package:

make

This package does not come with a test suite.

Install the package:

make install

Some packages provide UTF-8 man pages which this version of man is unable to display. The following script will allow some of these to be converted into the expected encodings shown in the table below. Man-DB expects the manual pages to be in the encodings in the table, and will convert them as necessary to the actual locale encoding when it displays them, so that they will display in both UTF-8 and traditional locales. Because this script is intended for limited use during the system build, for public data, we will not bother with error checking, nor use a non-predictable temporary file name:

cat >> convert-mans << "EOF"
#!/bin/sh -e
FROM="$1"
TO="$2"
shift ; shift
while [ $# -gt 0 ]
do
        FILE="$1"
        shift
        iconv -f "$FROM" -t "$TO" "$FILE" >.tmp.iconv
        mv .tmp.iconv "$FILE"
done
EOF
install -m755 convert-mans  /usr/bin

Additional information regarding the compression of man and info pages can be found in the BLFS book at http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/cvs/postlfs/compressdoc.html.

mkdir -p /usr/share/man/fr
cp -rv man? /usr/share/man/fr

mv man7/iso_8859-7.7{,X}
convert-mans UTF-8 ISO-8859-1 man?/*.?
mv man7/iso_8859-7.7{X,}
make install