Re: bin/46081: new apropos claims 'n' as invalid section

[Abhinav Upadhyay <er.abhinav.upadhyay%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Fri, Mar 2, 2012 at 11:15 PM, Martin S. Weber <Ephaeton%gmx.net@localhost> 
wrote:
> The following reply was made to PR bin/46081; it has been noted by GNATS.
>
> From: "Martin S. Weber" <Ephaeton%gmx.net@localhost>
> To: gnats-bugs%NetBSD.org@localhost
> Cc:
> Subject: Re: bin/46081: new apropos claims 'n' as invalid section
> Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2012 12:42:41 -0500
>
>  As a reminder: netbsd-6 sources' default man.conf establish
>  'n', 'l', '3F' and '3f' as valid, non-numeric sections. Also,
>  valid sections are not predefined, but configured via man.conf(5).
>
>  Imho, apropos/makemandb couldn't care less which section it's
>  indexing (except for, of course, it using an integer at the
>  moment to store the section. Then that's just a plain bug, too.)

Hi,

I have sent a patch to Joerg for review, supporting non-numeric
sections is trivial.

makemandb presently indexes only the first character of a section, so
for a section number like '3f' it stores the section number as '3' in
the database.
If you try to do a query for '3'f with apropos, it should not report
an error, but rather perform a search for section '3'. If it is purely
desirable that a query for '3f' should query only man pages from
section '3f' exactly, then it will be a bit of more work, but that is
also very trivial to do

--
Abhinav