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

[matthew green <mrg%eterna.com.au@localhost>]

The following reply was made to PR bin/46081; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: matthew green <mrg%eterna.com.au@localhost>
To: Abhinav Upadhyay <er.abhinav.upadhyay%gmail.com@localhost>
Cc: gnats-admin%netbsd.org@localhost, netbsd-bugs%netbsd.org@localhost, 
Ephaeton%gmx.net@localhost,
    gnats-bugs%netbsd.org@localhost
Subject: re: bin/46081: new apropos claims 'n' as invalid section
Date: Sun, 04 Mar 2012 13:57:58 +1100

 > I have sent a patch to Joerg for review, supporting non-numeric
 > sections is trivial.
 
 thanks for looking at this.
 
 > 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
 
 it seems to me that the right thing is to consider the section
 name a string not a number.  (i'm surprised that no one has added
 "1m" section to man.conf over the years.)  but this part is not
 nearly as important as working at all :)
 
 
 .mrg.