man-db-announce — Announcements about man-db

[Man-db-announce] man-db 2.4.0 released

[Colin W. <cjw...@de...>]

man-db: The on-line manual database
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I've released man-db version 2.4.0.

Description
-----------

man_db contains an implementation of the man command, which is the
primary way of examining the on-line help files (manual pages). Other
utilities provided include the whatis and apropos commands for searching
the manual page database, the manpath utility for determining the manual
page search path, and the maintenance utilities mandb, catman and
zsoelim. The package requires a troff installation, such as groff (GNU
troff) to format and display the manual pages.

About this release
------------------

This release features support for looking up manual pages
case-insensitively, and better automatic support for the UTF-8 character
encoding. In addition, it fixes a number of annoying segmentation fault
bugs in earlier releases, works around a misfeature in Berkeley DB upon
encountering a zero-length database, and drops setuid privileges in a
number of places where this had been forgotten.

The routines for locating manual pages and deciding which ones to
display have been substantially rewritten, in response to reports of
errors made by the old algorithms. Although I believe them to be robust,
reports of any new bugs that may be caused by this will as always be
greatly appreciated.

For full details of these and of the other improvements in this release,
please see the files docs/NEWS and docs/ChangeLog in the source
distribution.

  http://man-db.sourceforge.net/
  http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/man-db/man-db-2.4.0.tar.gz

Cheers,

--=20
Colin Watson                                       [cjw...@de...]

[Man-db-announce] man_db 2.3.20 released

[Colin W. <cjw...@de...>]

man_db: The on-line manual database
===================================

I've released man_db version 2.3.20.

Description
-----------

man_db contains an implementation of the man command, which is the
primary way of examining the on-line help files (manual pages). Other
utilities provided include the whatis and apropos commands for searching
the manual page database, the manpath utility for determining the manual
page search path, and the maintenance utilities mandb, catman and
zsoelim. The package requires a troff installation, such as groff (GNU
troff) to format and display the manual pages.

About this release
------------------

This is primarily a bug-fix release, with some improvements in national
language support. (In particular, it fixes a bug in 2.3.19 that made man
unusable in many locales.) It also features more careful handling of
temporary files, correct escaping of all arguments passed to the shell,
and better tolerance of database corruption.

With recent versions of groff, man now supports viewing HTML versions of
man pages, implementing the BROWSER specification as described at
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/BROWSER/.

For full details of these and of the other improvements in this release,
please see the files docs/NEWS and docs/ChangeLog in the source
distribution.

  http://man-db.sourceforge.net/
  http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/man-db/man_db-2.3.20.tar.gz

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjw...@de...]

[Man-db-announce] man_db 2.3.19 released

[Colin W. <cjw...@de...>]

man_db: The on-line manual database
===================================

I've released man_db version 2.3.19.

Description
-----------

man_db contains an implementation of the man command, which is the
primary way of examining the on-line help files (manual pages). Other
utilities provided include the whatis and apropos commands for searching
the manual page database, the manpath utility for determining the manual
page search path, and the maintenance utilities mandb, catman and
zsoelim. The package requires a troff installation, such as groff (GNU
troff) to format and display the manual pages.

About this release
------------------

This release makes it easier for distributors to allow the man_db tools
to be installed without elevated privileges. man_db can be compiled with
support for being installed setuid, but can then be installed without
the setuid bit with no ill effects. In this mode, cat pages will not be
saved. This is now the recommended way to install man_db.

man should now be much faster for all users, as it will not try to
update databases on the fly. While this behaviour had some benefits, it
often caused long delays in interactive use.

A number of other fixes and enhancements are included in this release,
including security fixes for those installing man_db setuid (e.g. the
configuration in ~/.manpath is not trusted), configurable section
ordering, recognition of terminal size, and a number of improvements to
the tools' robustness. For full details, please see the files docs/NEWS
and docs/ChangeLog in the source distribution.

  http://man-db.sourceforge.net/
  http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/man-db/man_db-2.3.19.tgz

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjw...@de...]

[Man-db-announce] man_db-2.3.18 released

[Colin W. <cjw...@de...>]

man_db: The on-line manual database
===================================

I've released man_db version 2.3.18.

Description
-----------

man_db contains an implementation of the man command, which is the
primary way of examining the on-line help files (manual pages). Other
utilities provided include the whatis and apropos commands for searching
the manual page database, the manpath utility for determining the manual
page search path, and the maintenance utilities mandb, catman and
zsoelim. The package requires a troff installation, such as groff (GNU
troff) to format and display the manual pages.

About this release
------------------

This is an interim release under new maintenance, merging most of the
work done by former maintainers (Graeme Wilford and Fabrizio Polacco,
both of whom I thank for their work). It incorporates several years of
changes made in the Debian GNU/Linux distribution's package of man_db,
as well as the previously missing changes from Graeme Wilford's 2.3.11
and 2.3b12 releases.

I intend to use this as a synchronization point to merge fixes and
improvements made by other distributions. I would greatly appreciate it
if anyone else using man_db as their manual pager could send me any
relevant patches.

This release includes several security fixes (temporary files, a format
string vulnerability, more careful privilege dropping), better handling
of locales, improved use of gettext, and a number of other major and
minor enhancements. For full details, please see the files docs/NEWS and
docs/ChangeLog in the source distribution.

  http://man-db.sourceforge.net/
  http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/man-db/man_db-2.3.18.tgz

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjw...@de...]