Linux From Scratch - Version 12.0

Chapter 8. Installing Basic System Software

8.75. Man-DB-2.11.2

The Man-DB package contains programs for finding and viewing man pages.

Approximate build time: 0.2 SBU
Required disk space: 40 MB

8.75.1. Installation of Man-DB

Prepare Man-DB for compilation: 

./configure --prefix=/usr                         \
            --docdir=/usr/share/doc/man-db-2.11.2 \
            --sysconfdir=/etc                     \
            --disable-setuid                      \
            --enable-cache-owner=bin              \
            --with-browser=/usr/bin/lynx          \
            --with-vgrind=/usr/bin/vgrind         \
            --with-grap=/usr/bin/grap             \
            --with-systemdtmpfilesdir=            \
            --with-systemdsystemunitdir=

The meaning of the configure options:

--disable-setuid

This disables making the man program setuid to user man.

--enable-cache-owner=bin

This changes ownership of the system-wide cache files to user bin.

--with-...

These three parameters are used to set some default programs. lynx is a text-based web browser (see BLFS for installation instructions), vgrind converts program sources to Groff input, and grap is useful for typesetting graphs in Groff documents. The vgrind and grap programs are not normally needed for viewing manual pages. They are not part of LFS or BLFS, but you should be able to install them yourself after finishing LFS if you wish to do so.

--with-systemd...

These parameters prevent installing unneeded systemd directories and files.

Compile the package: 

make

To test the results, issue: 

make -k check

One test named man1/lexgrog.1 is known to fail.

Install the package: 

make install

8.75.2. Non-English Manual Pages in LFS

The following table shows the character set that Man-DB assumes manual pages installed under /usr/share/man/<ll> will be encoded with. In addition to this, Man-DB correctly determines if manual pages installed in that directory are UTF-8 encoded.

Table 8.1. Expected character encoding of legacy 8-bit manual pages

Language (code) Encoding Language (code) Encoding
Danish (da) ISO-8859-1 Croatian (hr) ISO-8859-2
German (de) ISO-8859-1 Hungarian (hu) ISO-8859-2
English (en) ISO-8859-1 Japanese (ja) EUC-JP
Spanish (es) ISO-8859-1 Korean (ko) EUC-KR
Estonian (et) ISO-8859-1 Lithuanian (lt) ISO-8859-13
Finnish (fi) ISO-8859-1 Latvian (lv) ISO-8859-13
French (fr) ISO-8859-1 Macedonian (mk) ISO-8859-5
Irish (ga) ISO-8859-1 Polish (pl) ISO-8859-2
Galician (gl) ISO-8859-1 Romanian (ro) ISO-8859-2
Indonesian (id) ISO-8859-1 Greek (el) ISO-8859-7
Icelandic (is) ISO-8859-1 Slovak (sk) ISO-8859-2
Italian (it) ISO-8859-1 Slovenian (sl) ISO-8859-2
Norwegian Bokmal (nb) ISO-8859-1 Serbian Latin (sr@latin) ISO-8859-2
Dutch (nl) ISO-8859-1 Serbian (sr) ISO-8859-5
Norwegian Nynorsk (nn) ISO-8859-1 Turkish (tr) ISO-8859-9
Norwegian (no) ISO-8859-1 Ukrainian (uk) KOI8-U
Portuguese (pt) ISO-8859-1 Vietnamese (vi) TCVN5712-1
Swedish (sv) ISO-8859-1 Simplified Chinese (zh_CN) GBK
Belarusian (be) CP1251 Simplified Chinese, Singapore (zh_SG) GBK
Bulgarian (bg) CP1251 Traditional Chinese, Hong Kong (zh_HK) BIG5HKSCS
Czech (cs) ISO-8859-2 Traditional Chinese (zh_TW) BIG5

[Note]

Note

Manual pages in languages not in the list are not supported.

8.75.3. Contents of Man-DB

Installed programs: accessdb, apropos (link to whatis), catman, lexgrog, man, man-recode, mandb, manpath, and whatis
Installed libraries: libman.so and libmandb.so (both in /usr/lib/man-db)
Installed directories: /usr/lib/man-db, /usr/libexec/man-db, and /usr/share/doc/man-db-2.11.2

Short Descriptions

accessdb

Dumps the whatis database contents in human-readable form

apropos

Searches the whatis database and displays the short descriptions of system commands that contain a given string

catman

Creates or updates the pre-formatted manual pages

lexgrog

Displays one-line summary information about a given manual page

man

Formats and displays the requested manual page

man-recode

Converts manual pages to another encoding

mandb

Creates or updates the whatis database

manpath

Displays the contents of $MANPATH or (if $MANPATH is not set) a suitable search path based on the settings in man.conf and the user's environment

whatis

Searches the whatis database and displays the short descriptions of system commands that contain the given keyword as a separate word

libman

Contains run-time support for man

libmandb

Contains run-time support for man