I’ve released man-db 2.11.0 (announcement, NEWS), and uploaded it to Debian unstable.
The biggest chunk of work here was fixing some extremely long-standing issues with how the database is built. Despite being in the package name, man-db’s database is much less important than it used to …
I’ve released man-db 2.8.7 (announcement, NEWS), and uploaded it to Debian unstable.
There are a few things of note that I wanted to talk about here. Firstly, I made some further improvements to the seccomp sandbox originally introduced in 2.8.0. I do still think it …
Today I released man-db 2.7.6 (announcement, NEWS, git log), and uploaded it to Debian unstable. The major change in this release was a set of fixes for two security vulnerabilities, one of which affected all man-db installations since 2.3.12 (or 2.3.10-66 in Debian), and …
I’ve released man-db 2.6.0 (announcement, NEWS, ChangeLog), and uploaded it to Debian unstable. Ubuntu is rapidly approaching beta freeze so I’m not going to try to cram this into 11.04; it’ll be in 11.10.
I just found out by chance that Fedora 14 switched from their old man package to man-db. This is great news: it should now be the beginning of the end of the divergence of man implementations that happened way back in the mid-1990s, when two different people took John W …
In my previous post, I described the pipeline library from man-db and asked whether people were interested in a standalone release of it. Several people expressed interest, and so I’ve now released libpipeline version 1.0.0. It’s in the Debian NEW queue, and my PPA contains packages …
When I took over man-db in 2001, one of the
major problems that became evident after maintaining it for a while was the
way it handled subprocesses. The nature of man and friends means that it
spends a lot of time calling sequences of programs such as zsoelim <
input-file | tbl …
I did a bit of catching up on my Debian backlog over the last week or so. Among the things I got round to:
I recently implemented man -K (full-text search over all manual pages) in
man-db. This was inspired by a similar feature
in Federico Lucifredi’s man
package (formerly maintained by Andries Brouwer). I think I did a much
better job of it, though. The man package just forks grep for every …
See Encodings in man-db for context.
Yesterday, I uploaded man-db 2.5.1-1 to unstable. With this version, not only is it possible to install manual pages in UTF-8 (as with 2.5.0, although with fewer bugs), but it’s also possible to ask man to produce a …