[12964] in Athena Bugs
decmips 7.7G: /usr/athena/bin/man
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (jhawk@MIT.EDU)
Wed Nov 30 16:57:29 1994
From: jhawk@MIT.EDU
To: bugs@MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 30 Nov 1994 16:57:19 EST
System name: w20-575-40
Type and version: KN02ca 7.7G
Display type: PMAG-DV
What were you trying to do?
1] Read the man page for man
2] Change the pager used by man
3] Check the source for man
What's wrong:
1] Per athena_path from /usr/athena/lib/init/cshrc, the appropriate
(default) man program to use is /usr/athena/bin/man. There is
no corresponding /usr/athena/man/*/man.?. This is a bug.
2] Under most variants of man, you can change the pager used by
setting the PAGER environment variable. In my opinion, any version
of man that does not support this has a bug. In particular, since
the Solaris man (/usr/ucb/man) supports this, all other Athena
platforms should, as well. Setting PAGER has no effect for either
/usr/athena/bin/man (the default man), /usr/ucb/man (what would
otherwise be the default man), or /usr/bin/man (the last resort).
The existance of this bug, along with other Ultrix oddities, is
presumably the reason for /usr/athena/bin/man's existance in
the first place; having it fail to correct this is a bug.
3] I attempted to find the source to /usr/athena/bin/man; I observed
that I could not access:
/afs/dev/source/src/decmips. This seems odd given that
system:anyuser can access /afs/dev/source/src/{rsaix,sun4}.
I also observed that there was no /afs/dev/source/src/usr/athena/bin.
FILES.look provides the following man.c's:
man.c ./src/bsd-4.3/common/ucb/man.c
man.c ./src/decmips/ucb/man.c
man.c ./src/third/supported/X11R4/clients/xman/man.c
man.c ./src/third/supported/X11R5/mit/clients/xman/man.c
man.c ./src/third/supported/X11R5/mit/demos/xgas/man.c
Since the last 3 are unlikely and the second is unavailable, I
attempted to examine the first. Alas, src/bsd-4.3 is inaccessible
as well.
What should have happened:
I think the above is largely self-explanatory. To reinforce the
point, however: normal Athena users should have access to MIT-written
sources wherever possible .
Please describe any relevant documentation references:
See above.
--jhawk
ps: A bug[-report] a day keeps rel-eng away.
