[Man-db-announce] man-db 2.9.0 released

[Colin Watson]

I've released man-db 2.9.0.

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
==================

Fixes:
------

* man --recode and manconv now adjust encoding declarations on the
  first line of their input to refer to the new encoding.

* Fix comparison of candidate manual pages to correctly handle the case
  where the language elements are the same and match the locale, but
  the territory elements differ.

Improvements:
-------------

* Many typographical improvements to man-db's own manual pages,
  largely thanks to Bjarni Ingi Gislason.

* Rewrite parts of man(1) to make it a more accessible introduction.

* If run with no arguments or only a section, man now suggests
  running "man man".

* man now understands the <page>(<section>) form on its command
  line, so for example "man 'chmod(2)'" is now the same as "man 2
  chmod".  While this requires more quoting, it may also be more
  convenient when copying and pasting cross-references to manual
  pages.)

* manconv now guesses the input encoding based on the file name if
  it is not explicitly specified.

* There is a new "man-recode" program.  It fulfils a purpose similar
  to "man --recode", but has an interface designed for bulk
  conversion and so can be much faster when used on a large number
  of pages.

Compatibility notes:
--------------------

* Remove the ability to undefine COMP_SRC at build-time to disable
  reading compressed manual pages.  This was always only a
  micro-optimisation, and it wasn't worth the extra code complexity.
  You can still configure without any compressors (either by not
  having them available at build time, or by configuring with
  "--with-gzip=" etc.) to achieve much the same practical effect,
  although the test suite still requires at least gunzip.

For full details, please see the ChangeLog file in the source
distribution.

  https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/man-db/
  https://savannah.nongnu.org/download/man-db/man-db-2.9.0.tar.xz
  https://savannah.nongnu.org/download/man-db/man-db-2.9.0.tar.xz.asc

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [address@hidden]

signature.asc
Description: PGP signature