GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 331831
Search results may not display all available man pages
Last modified: 2006-05-11 18:12:19 UTC
Please describe the problem: yelp-search-pager.c(process_man_result) splits the result of running apropos with the search term at the '-', and skips the result if the splitting resulted in more than 2 parts. This could (and does) happen if the manpage description and/or the manpage name contain literal '-'s, for example: mktexlsr(1) - create ls-R databases This result would be skipped. Steps to reproduce: Search using yelp for man pages containing '-' in their name or description. Actual results: Search results are skipped, i.e. you don't see those in the resulting page. Expected results: Manpages should be listed. Does this happen every time? Yes. Other information: I have no idea how to parse the apropos output differently to avoid this issue without introducing other parsing problems, unfortunately.
Confirming. It affects a whole slew of man pages (try searching for apt). Unfortunately, any fix is going to be a fair chunk of code and (basically) a rewrite of the process_man_result function (and probably process_info_result) which isn't going to happen before gnome 2.14. I'll look at this again 2.14 is out.
I was just thinking if it could make sens to provide some information to the user, a la "Sorry for the incovenience, but a few results were skipped. Use <whatever command> to view those"?
OK, new man result parser in bug #339595 (with various other improvements) - marking this as a dependant.
Patch from bug #339595 has been applied to head. This fixes the issues raised in this bug. Closing.