man-db 2.4.2 (20 September 2003)
================================

Major changes since man-db 2.4.1:

	Fixes:
	------

	o SECURITY: Fix a number of buffer overruns in configuration file
	  handling, ultimate source location, and MANPATH processing. This
	  is CVE CAN-2003-0620.

	o SECURITY: Restrict the use of the DEFINE directive in ~/.manpath
	  to code running with dropped privilege. Previously, the
	  'compressor' variable could be used to run arbitrary code with
	  raised privilege. This is CVE CAN-2003-0645.

	o Make sure to initialize mandata structures to zero. The uses of
	  uninitialized memory resulting from this had been leading to
	  random segfaults.

	o Drop privileges in order to be able to read pages in
	  non-world-readable user manpaths while setuid.

	o man can be built with --disable-setuid again.

	o man's locale support has been revamped. The encoding of source
	  manual pages is no longer related to the encoding of the input
	  passed to *roff or to *roff's terminal output device. These
	  frequently differ, especially in UTF-8 locales but in other
	  circumstances as well, and a "just send 8-bit data" approach is no
	  longer adequate. If you are using a version of groff with the
	  Debian multibyte patch applied, pass the --enable-mb-groff option
	  to configure.

	o When using GDBM, accessdb and apropos did not return database
	  entries in sorted order, since GDBM's key traversal interface is
	  not lexicographically ordered. The database layer has been
	  corrected to cope with this.

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

	o man now calls mandb to update databases rather than doing it
	  itself. This leaves cat pages as the sole remaining reason for man
	  to be setuid.

	o The "undocumented" message is only displayed if a corresponding
	  executable is found on the $PATH.

	o All programs that read ~/.manpath now take a -C option to cause
	  them to read a different user configuration file instead.

	o The --enable-debug option to configure has been removed. man-db's
	  Makefiles now always calculate full dependencies for C files.

	o mandb caches the contents of directories, significantly speeding
	  up the purging of obsolete entries.

	o mandb now knows how to purge database entries corresponding to
	  removed stray cat pages.

	In addition, a pipeline execution library has been written, which
	will make it possible to eliminate all or almost all use of the
	shell in a future release. Unfortunately, time pressures due to the
	security issues above meant that the pipeline library was not well
	enough tested for use in this release, so it is present but unused.
	That will be the first item for 2.4.3.

man-db 2.4.1 (22 December 2002)
===============================

Major changes since man-db 2.4.0:

	The man-db CVS repository has moved from sourceforge.net to
	savannah.nongnu.org.

	Fixes:
	------

	o Don't enter an infinite loop when the SYSTEM environment variable
	  is set.

	o man doesn't segfault when trying to follow a broken symlink.

	o mandb no longer corrupts databases when deleting entries that are
	  part of multi keys.

	o Prevent a possible buffer overflow when encountering large multi
	  keys.

	o Man page names are escaped when globbing, so [(1) can now be found
	  even if the database is not up to date.

	o Correct an access() check that led to 'man -X -l -' producing no
	  output.

	o lexgrog can now cope with man pages containing only a .so link.

	o Manual hierarchies with a specific encoding are put into the
	  search path in the correct order. A bug in $LANGUAGE handling had
	  formerly meant that 'de' would take precedence over 'de_DE.UTF-8'.

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

	o man's behaviour when searching for page names that begin with a
	  digit has been made more intuitive, as has its treatment of
	  section names that are extensions of ones mentioned in the
	  configuration file but are not themselves explicitly named as
	  sections.

	o The default line length for pages formatted for terminal output
	  has been increased (reducing margin size) to match the default in
	  groff 1.18.

	o Proofread the manual.

	o The -w flag to man has been changed to display the name of only
	  the source nroff file. A -W flag has been introduced which
	  displays the name of the cat file as well. If both flags are given
	  to man, it will behave as before.

	o If bzip2 is installed, pages compressed with bzip2 can now be
	  displayed.

	o Add support for displaying an additional message when no man page
	  is found, which can be used to direct users to a generic
	  "undocumented" page.

	o The manual hierarchy layout will now be guessed where possible if
	  an explicit --enable-mandirs argument is not passed to configure.

man-db 2.4.0 (26 June 2002)
===========================

Major changes since man_db-2.3.20:

	I have changed the package name to man-db, as the underscore was
	awkward.

	Upgrading from version 2.3.x:
	-----------------------------

	The database format has changed slightly, so you will need to run
	'mandb --create' after installing the new version to rebuild your
	databases from scratch. (Distribution packages should do this
	automatically for system databases.)

	Fixes:
	------

	o The GNU nroff test in configure now works when /bin/sh is ash.

	o When scanning pages for NAME sections, lexgrog and mandb no longer
	  accidentally eat the line after each occurrence of the no-op
	  request '.'.

	o 'man --local' drops privileges throughout to avoid problems with
	  non-world-readable home directories.

	o Newly created cat directories are chowned to the man user when
	  running as root.

	o 'man --html' no longer creates its temporary file with raised
	  privileges, so that it now works with a setuid man.

	o man detects preprocessors correctly when setuid.

	o Various segfault fixes: explicitly null-terminate data returned by
	  the Berkeley DB library to avoid some rare crashes; don't reuse a
	  freed pointer in some cases of pages with multiple names; handle
	  MANPATHs containing '::' more safely.

	o Correctly parse manual pages using DOS line-ending conventions.

	o Work around a misfeature in Berkeley DB: it pauses for several
	  seconds if asked to read a zero-length database, on the assumption
	  that somebody is still writing the metadata page. man is generally
	  better off just ignoring the database in this case.

	o Work around corrupted databases in the case where the nextkey
	  pointer chain contains a loop.

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

	o man looks in the filesystem followed by the database, rather than
	  the other way round. Unix filesystems are quite good databases for
	  this purpose, and the man database is only superior when looking
	  up names that don't have associated links in the filesystem.

	o 'apropos --wildcard --exact' makes sure wildcards match an entire
	  description or page name, unlike 'apropos --wildcard' which may
	  match on word boundaries too.

	o man's page-searching code has been substantially rearranged, and
	  now only starts displaying pages when it has finished searching
	  for candidates. This allows pages to be sorted more sensibly.

	o Manual pages are formatted in UTF-8 if that is the current
	  locale's character set. The -E option is now available to force a
	  particular encoding. Note that some versions of (e.g.) less have
	  problems displaying UTF-8 in conjunction with backspace
	  characters; groff 1.18 should alleviate this by using ANSI colour
	  escapes instead.

	o The less prompt string sets -PM as well as -Pm.

	o Invoking man from within less now sets the correct page title in
	  the inner less.

	o Unless the --match-case option is used, man will search for pages
	  case-insensitively.

	o Update the mechanism for setting the line length so that it also
	  works with groff 1.18.

	o The -R switch is added to the less prompt string, which is needed
	  to display the ANSI colour escapes generated by groff 1.18
	  correctly.

	o The $MANLESS environment variable may be used to override the
	  normal creation of the less prompt string.

	o Translation updates for French, German, and Spanish, and a new
	  Catalan translation. See man/THANKS.

man_db-2.3.20 (7 September 2001)
================================

Major changes since man_db-2.3.19:

	Fixes:
	------

	o A typo in 2.3.19 caused character sets for many languages to be
	  detected incorrectly. This especially affected multibyte
	  languages.

	o Long options in the environment variable LESS are handled
	  correctly.

	o When checking if cat pages need to be updated, check for different
	  timestamps rather than whether the cat page is newer, as otherwise
	  we were confused by tools like tar that preserve timestamps in
	  their archives. Each cat page is now set to have the same mtime as
	  its corresponding man page.

	o Look up the correct character set each time a page is displayed
	  rather than just the first time, in case pages in several
	  different character sets are viewed in a single session.

	o groff requests are no longer assumed to be case-insensitive when
	  scanning for preprocessors, so for example mdoc's .Eq request
	  isn't mistaken for the .EQ which introduces eqn commands.

	o Escape arguments passed to the shell that might contain dangerous
	  characters.

	o Avoid an infinite loop if the LANGUAGE environment variable is set
	  but empty.

	o The --create option to mandb now implies --no-purge.

	o Temporary files are handled with more secure permissions.

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

	o Use a variant of mkstemp() rather than tempnam(), to avoid classic
	  race conditions. (I don't believe the races were usefully
	  exploitable.)

	o Tolerate whatis entries in a database that point to themselves.

	o Detect more translations of the NAME section.

	o Add examples of man pages written in POD and SGML.

	o lexgrog is now installed in /usr/bin by default, with proper
	  argument parsing, an improved output format, and a man page. It is
	  expected to be used by programs that need to validate man pages.

	o The -H (--html) option to man is now compiled in by default, and
	  supports the BROWSER specification (as documented at
	  http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/BROWSER/ and amended at
	  http://www.dwheeler.com/browse/secure_browser.html).

man_db-2.3.19 (5 July 2001)
===========================

Major changes since man_db-2.3.18:

	Fixes:
	------

	o The user configuration file ~/.manpath is no longer trusted when
	  deciding whether to drop privileges. In the process, user cat
	  directory handling has been improved.

	o Commands of the form 'man -S "" foo' formerly emptied the list of
	  acceptable sections and then searched the database anyway, and
	  commands of the form 'man -S ::: foo' segfaulted. Both now use the
	  standard list of sections.

	o The HUP and TERM signals are now handled better.

	o straycats processing invokes 'col -bx' rather than 'col-bx'.

	o The root user is now correctly allowed to update databases in
	  system manpaths.

	o apropos and whatis no longer enter infinite recursion if a
	  database contains an entry pointing to itself.

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

	o When compiled with --enable-setuid, man and mandb can be installed
	  non-setuid. In this mode, they will be unable to write cat pages
	  in system directories or to modify system databases, but will
	  otherwise operate correctly. This allows a single binary package
	  to support setuid and non-setuid modes of operation.

	o The ordering of manual sections is read from SECTION directives in
	  the configuration file rather than being hard-coded.

	o The MANDB_MAP configuration file directive is documented more
	  clearly.

	o Multiple whatis entries separated by commas, break requests,
	  and/or paragraph requests are handled more intelligently.

	o Fill control requests (.nf and .fi) cause lexgrog to assume a
	  break at each newline.

	o Duplicate manpath entries (often generated in the course of
	  national language support) are removed, so that 'man -a' works
	  better.

	o man_db's binaries are installed unstripped by default.

	o Since supporting certain layouts of manual page hierarchies causes
	  problems for others, the layout is now selectable via configure.
	  The default is to try all layouts.

	o man only does an on-the-fly update of the database caches when the
	  --update option is given.

	o Manual pages are displayed with a line length appropriate to the
	  current terminal. If a non-standard line length is used (i.e. the
	  terminal is not between 66 and 80 characters wide) then cat pages
	  will not be saved.

	o mandb tries to purge obsolete entries from its databases. Using
	  the --create flag should now usually only be necessary in cases of
	  database corruption.

man_db-2.3.18 (14 May 2001)
===========================

Major changes since man_db-2.3.11:

	man_db-2.3.18 is an interim release under new maintenance by Colin
	Watson, merging much of the work done by former maintainers (Graeme
	Wilford and Fabrizio Polacco). It incorporates several years of
	changes made in the Debian GNU/Linux distribution's package of
	man_db.

	Here are a few highlights, with the names of the maintainers
	responsible for them. As I am documenting after the fact of other
	people's changes of a few years ago, I have undoubtedly missed a
	number of fixes and improvements; I promise to keep track of these
	as I go along in future.

	Fixes:
	------

	o Multiple security fixes, including better handling of temporary
	  files, a format string vulnerability fix, and more careful
	  dropping of privileges when running setuid. [Fabrizio, Colin]

	o Databases no longer disappear temporarily while they are being
	  regenerated. [Fabrizio]

	o Corrected handling of locale environment variables. Setting
	  several colon-separated locales in $LANGUAGE also works now.
	  [Colin]

	o whatis and apropos are more careful about the possibility of a
	  corrupted database. [Fabrizio, Colin]

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

	o If root has private manual hierarchies, cat pages generated from
	  them are no longer chowned to a less-privileged user. [Wilf]

	o Rewrote configuration file handling, adding DEFINE directives to
	  set paths to external programs. The configuration file is now
	  called man_db.conf. [Wilf]

	o Support FHS paths (/usr/share/man and /var/cache/man) in
	  preference to FSSTND paths (/usr/man and /var/catman). [Fabrizio]

	o Converted from catgets to GNU gettext for national language
	  support. [Fabrizio, Colin]

	o Several new and improved localized message catalogues and
	  translated man pages. [Fabrizio, Colin, other contributors]

	o Added accessdb utility, which displays the contents of a manual
	  page database. [Fabrizio]

	o Added user configuration file ~/.manpath, with the same syntax as
	  the global configuration file. [Fabrizio]

	o Leading or trailing colons in the MANPATH environment variable
	  cause the manpath derived from configuration files to be prepended
	  or appended respectively. A double colon in the middle of the
	  environment variable causes the configuration file manpath to be
	  inserted between the colons. [Fabrizio]

	o Added experimental -H and -Thtml options to take advantage of
	  groff's new HTML driver. [Fabrizio]

	o lexgrog now scans manual pages to guess which preprocessors are
	  needed. [Fabrizio]

	o Create cat directories on the fly if necessary. [Fabrizio]

	o Supply a wrapper which explicitly drops privileges to uid man if
	  man or mandb is run as root. In the future, splitting out setuid
	  functions into a separate helper process may remove the need for
	  this paranoia. [Fabrizio]

	o Add --test option to mandb, which merely reports errors in manual
	  page hierarchies rather than actually creating or updating a
	  database. [Fabrizio, Colin]

	o Manual pages may now be symlinks outside the mantree. This should
	  pose no significant security concerns, and utilities such as GNU
	  stow create such symlinks. [Colin]

	o Deprecate whatis references for man, and display a warning if
	  displaying a page relies on going through a whatis reference. They
	  often lead to confusingly non-obviously-deterministic behaviour,
	  and guaranteeing that man will honour them even when the database
	  is out of date causes performance problems. [Colin]

man_db-2.3.11 (21 September 1995)
=================================

Major changes since man_db-2.3.10:

	o The man_db manual is bundled in source form.
 
	o Components of $PATH not in the config file were checked for
	  `man' subdirectories.  Now they are also checked for `../man'.
	
	o Untarring a new manual page (with a timestamp older than the
	  relative cat file) over the original did *not* cause man/catman 
	  to reformat the replacement.  This is changed.  As a side effect, 
	  untarring an unchanged man file over the original will also cause 
	  a reformat.

man_db-2.3.10 (13 July 1995)
============================

Major changes since man_db-2.3.5:

	Fixes:
	------

	o Global databases were not owned by setuid owner (if applicable).
	  As a consequence only mandb could update the databases unless
	  man was run by superuser.  Stupid bug.  

	o The keyword passed to apropos _never_ matched the first word
	  of any whatis line.

	o FAVOUR_STRAYCATS code (if enabled), did not work properly.

	o zsoelim did not work as advertised.

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

	o Man removes its temporary files upon abnormal termination.

	o apropos does proper word matching rather than the fuzzy
	  matching of 2.3.5.  eg. supplying any of the keywords:
	  `ld.so', `a.out', `dynamic', `linker' or `loader' will match 
	  the following entry:

	  ld.so (8)            - a.out dynamic linker/loader
	
	  whereas `a.out' and `loader' used to fail.

	o man/whatis/apropos return with exit code 16 if manual
	  page/file or keyword is not matched.  Previously exit code 0
	  was used making it difficult for callers to know if the lookup 
	  was successful.

	o addition of German message catalogue.

	o `apropos' and `man -k' do POSIX specified regex matching rather 
	  than keyword searches if the environment variable POSIXLY_CORRECT 
	  is defined.

	o added glob-only support of native system manual hierarchies
	  on HP-UX, OSF and Solaris operating systems.  Improved the
	  whatis parsing code to cope with majority of HP-UX manual pages.

	o ported to NeXTstep.

man_db-2.3.5 (21 April 1995)
============================

Major changes since man_db-2.2.1:

	Added support for...
	--------------------
	
	o Non-standard section names i.e. multi-character

	o Compressed manual pages. 
	  A new utility `zsoelim' is included to correctly handle nroff
	  .so requests that point to a file which has been compressed.

	o Compressed stray cats.
	  By definition, stray cats are not re-creatable as they have no
	  relative source manual page. As they may have non-default
	  compression extensions and may reside on read-only media, 
	  stray cats have the same compression support as manual pages.

	o FSSTND proposed `extension' support.
	  Specific package manual pages may be installed in the standard 
	  sections but with a package-unique extension appended as in
	  exit(3tcl) - ../man/man3/exit.3tcl.  Using the command 

		`man -e tcl exit' 

	  would then display an exit manual page with a tcl extension, if
	  available.  Of course, `man 3tcl exit' works as always.

	o FSSTND proposed NLS man subdirectories.
	  Of the form .../man/<locale>/man<sec>/

	o NLS message catalogue hooks.
	  Provision has been made for the programs to emit their messages in
	  a language dependent form.

	o `whatis' referred manual pages.
	  Some manual pages contain relevant information for commands or 
	  programs that would not otherwise reference the page.
	  The `whatis' part of the manual page is used to create virtual
	  links to these pages by all of the names mentioned within it.
	  Examples include names such as `.' and `:' referencing the local
	  shell manual page.

	o Catman utility.
	  Used to pre-format the manual pages into cat pages.

	o Operating systems other than Linux.
	  man_db has been reported to compile on the following platforms:
	  
		Linux, SunOS, Solaris, Ultrix, OSF, HP-UX, AIX, IRIX

          (although portability does not extend to support of native 
	   manual tree structures on some of these systems, eg. HP-UX)

	o Berkeley DB library routines.
	  This compliments the support of both gdbm and ndbm which already
	  existed.  DB databases may be shared across platforms.

	o $MANOPTS environment variable.
	  The environment variable MANOPTS may be set to any string in
	  command line option/argument format.  It is parsed by man(1) prior
	  to its actual command line.

	o Per manual hierarchy cat directory locations.
	  It is possible to redirect your cat pages to other directories or
	  even other file systems. 
	  
	o Per manual hierarchy nroff/[tg]roff format scripts.
	  Ability to create custom formatter scripts that are called by
	  man(1) to enable format/display of non-standard manual pages or 
	  manual pages requiring a special macro package.

	o Extension of `man -l'.
	  Arguments following -l are interpreted as local files requiring
	  format and display.  Extensions are: 

		`man -l -' formats and displays stdin.
		`man -l foo.1.gz' decompresses, formats and displays foo.1.gz.
	
	o Latin1 manual pages/choice of nroff output device.

	o Viewing of ASCII manual pages formatted for a latin1 output device
	  on a 7 bit ASCII terminal (-7).
	  
	o Whatis and apropos utilities support regex and wildcard matching.

	o checkman. 
	  Shell script utility that will find and display duplicated manual
	  pages found across manual page hierarchies.

	o mkcatdirs. 
	  Shell script utility to create appropriate cat directories after
	  installation and setup.

	Conceptual improvements
	-----------------------

	o Replacement of single database with multiple modular db's.
	  Easier integration of additional information into the databases in
	  the future. 

	o Both user and global databases share the same name: 
	  	
		`index.<db-type>' 
	
	  where <db-type> could be `bt', `db' or `pag' and `dir'.

	o Databases contain `whatis' text.
	  Makewhatis and text whatis databases are redundant, although
	  whatis and apropos will use the text whatis database for information 
	  if they cannot read from a relevant index database.

	o straycats handled without need for `placeholders'.

	o Friendly less(1) prompt.
	  If man(1) uses less(1) as its pager (dependent on both static and
	  dynamic factors), the prompt is modified to suit the manual page 
	  being displayed.  The modification performed is also changeable by
	  the user.

	o man_db manual.
	  man_db has a manual that covers the setup, maintenance and use of
	  a generic online manual page system.

	o Modes of operation.
	  The man_db utilities can be compiled with various modes of
	  operation in mind.  Eg. man can be stopped from updating databases 
	  and/or creating cat files in situations where security is extremely 
	  important.  See the man_db manual for details.

	Speed improvements
	------------------

	o Background compression/saving of cat files.
	  Cat files are compressed and saved in the background, whilst the
	  user is able to browse the formatted page directly.

	o Merge of straycats and makewhatis into mandb.
	  While mandb has slowed, it now incorporates makewhatis and straycats 
	  functionality and is much faster as a whole.  2.0a2 used grep/awk, 
	  2.2 used C regex and 2.3 now uses lex sourced C to strip out the 
	  whatis information from the raw man or cat files.

	o Berkeley DB support.
	  Provides lower database initialisation overhead as compared with 
	  gdbm.

	o Extremely fast whatis(1) searches.
	  whatis(1) uses keyed database lookups to retrieve whatis strings
	  for standard (non regex/wildcard) searches.
	
	Fixes
	-----
	
	o Correct handling of $MANSECT.
	  The environment variable MANSECT is no longer ignored.

	o Acknowledgement of $MANPATH order.
	  manpath elements are searched in the order specified.