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From: Bill Bumgarner <bbum@friday.com>
Date: Wed, 30 Oct 96 14:54:15 -0600
To: submit@bugs.debian.org
Subject: Invalid /etc/alternatives/ symlinks
Reply-To: bbum@friday.com


Package: mawk
Version: 1.3.2-1

Upon installation, mawk fails to install correct links in /etc/alternatives  
for the awk and nawk man pages.

Specifically, the links in /etc/alternatives are to the uncompressed  
versions of the man pages.  But the man pages are compressed.

$ cd /etc/alternatives/
$ ls -alF
total 4
drwxr-xr-x   2 root     root         1024 Oct 30 14:49 ./
drwxr-xr-x  25 root     root         3072 Oct 30 14:37 ../
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root           13 Oct 30 14:48 awk -> /usr/bin/mawk*
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root           23 Oct 30 14:48 awk.1 ->  
/usr/man/man1/mawk.1
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root           13 Oct 30 14:48 nawk -> /usr/bin/mawk*
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root           23 Oct 30 14:48 nawk.1 ->  
/usr/man/man1/mawk.1

Changing the symbolic links to...

lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root           23 Oct 30 14:48 awk.1 ->  
/usr/man/man1/mawk.1.gz
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root           23 Oct 30 14:48 nawk.1 ->  
/usr/man/man1/mawk.1.gz

...fixes the problems.

What is really annoying about this bug is that the error message produced  
everytime one requests a man page for a package that doesn't exist looks  
really ugly and will strike fear in the hearts of mortal users (it mentions  
something about a 'bad .so request' as well as the bad symlink).