man-db 2.5.4
This release adds support for regular expression and wildcard searches
in man, and for disabling hyphenation; it fixes a few bugs in manual
page ordering and fixes lexgrog's parsing to stop on any unrecognised
request; and it improves support for the recently-released Groff 1.20.
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Release notes
Fixes:
------
o Build fixes for systems without GNU Make, and for systems without
gettext; this successfully covers at least FreeBSD.
o The distclean target now works if po4a isn't installed.
o Exit as soon as possible if database writes return ENOSPC.
o lexgrog now stops on any unrecognised roff request, rather than
continuing and often littering the database with garbage.
o man no longer requires both standard input and standard output to
be terminals in order to use the terminal line length. The line
length from standard output is preferred if available.
o The manpath was built completely wrongly when multiple entries
were present in LANGUAGE: duplicates were handled strangely, and
languages were effectively iterated in reverse order. It should be
rather more sensible now.
Improvements:
-------------
o The MAN_KEEP_STDERR environment variable can now be used to
override man's default of discarding stderr when stdout is a
terminal.
o Handling of terminal widths for cat pages is now configurable,
using the MINCATWIDTH, MAXCATWIDTH, and CATWIDTH configuration
file directives.
o 'man -a' now detects duplicate manual page candidates more
reliably, and sorts them better.
o Belarusian, Estonian, Greek, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian,
Romanian, Slovenian, and Ukrainian pages are now supported.
o man can now search for pages using regular expressions (with
--regex) or shell wildcards (with --wildcard). By default this
searches both page names and descriptions, like apropos, but if
the --names-only option is used then it searches page names only,
like whatis.
o man can now tell nroff to disable hyphenation if the
--no-hyphenation option is used.
o man-db already searched for manual pages in ../man and man
directories relative to each $PATH component; it now searches in
../share/man and share/man directories too.
o Groff 1.20 was recently released, including the 'preconv'
preprocessor. Although man-db has supported preconv to some extent
since 2.4.4, man-db's configure now detects its presence and
infers that groff supports Unicode input using it; man also now
takes slightly better advantage of preconv than before.
o Per-locale groff macros are now loaded if possible, allowing us to
take advantage of such things as localised versions of predefined
strings and language-aware hyphenation. This only works with Groff
1.20.2 or better (not yet released), since earlier versions did
not allow us to suppress warnings in the event that the
appropriate macro file is not available.
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