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.

Milestone information

Project:
man-db
Series:
main
Version:
2.5.4
Released:
 
Registrant:
Colin Watson
Release registered:
Active:
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download icon man-db-2.5.4.tar.gz (md5, sig) man-db 2.5.4 142
last downloaded 44 weeks ago
Total downloads: 142

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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