The "man" command is an "alternate"? Why?
by rnturn from LinuxQuestions.org on (#57STW)
After applying the latest round up updates to Tumble yesterday, noticed that some things were broken: "man" for one. There was no "man" command available. I issued "file $( which man )" and found that it was supposed to be a symbolic link to "/etc/alternatives/man" but it was broken. The object under "/etc/alternatives" was, in turn, a symbolic link to "/usr/libexec/man-db/wrapper". Outside of a few messages regarding permissions changes that always show up during update installations, I saw no error messages related to the updates to the "man" packages.
(Leaving the system without a working "man" is something of a show stopper so I give these updates a grade of "F".)
Fortunately, YaST was not broken by the updates and I was able to remove "man" and the "manpage" packages and re-install them.
Q: Why has "man" been relegated to "alternate" status?
I suppose a related question would be when was this was done as I noticed it's also "alternate" on a Leap 15.1 system. (I likely wouldn't have noticed had the Tumbleweed updates not borked the command.) Ultimately, the question is:
Anyone have information about this?
Cheers...
(Leaving the system without a working "man" is something of a show stopper so I give these updates a grade of "F".)
Fortunately, YaST was not broken by the updates and I was able to remove "man" and the "manpage" packages and re-install them.
Q: Why has "man" been relegated to "alternate" status?
I suppose a related question would be when was this was done as I noticed it's also "alternate" on a Leap 15.1 system. (I likely wouldn't have noticed had the Tumbleweed updates not borked the command.) Ultimately, the question is:
Alternate to what exactly?My internet searches aren't finding anything and I would expect there'd have been a lot of discussion about this change. Does nobody read manpages any more?
Anyone have information about this?
Cheers...