Ubuntu
coreutils package

coreutils 'info command' broken

Bug #1384416 reported by A. Eibach
6
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
coreutils
Fix Released
Unknown
coreutils (Ubuntu)
Triaged
Low
Unassigned

Bug Description

Try the following on Ubuntu (or one of its flavors) and tell me what you see:

$ info coreutils 'cat invocation'

Should give you the *detailed* cat manual. However, you will in fact land on "2.14 'coreutils' Multi-call binary" in the documentation. Now idea yet how to fix this.

Great job. Seems the bug they reported on Debian mailing list on 9/11 (2014)

https://<email address hidden>/msg1256146.html

... has now made its way into the Ubuntu version of coreutils as well.

By the way, isn't that a great comment again??

"though downstream 8.23 could be tweaked to avoid this issue."

Cool. They've broken something that worked perfectly _for years_ and all the user gets is "yeah, 8.23 'could be tweaked'". If only he had said _how_ to tweak it!! But apparently the commenter was way too lazy to write one more line.

A. Eibach (andi3)
affects: ubuntu → coreutils (Ubuntu)
Revision history for this message
C de-Avillez (hggdh2) wrote :

Thank you for opening this bug and helping make Ubuntu, and free software, better.

The Debian bug I linked to has more information, and is the core bug for this issue. Right now, for Ubuntu (and Debian) 'info <coreutils command>" will work, and can be used as a bypass.

I am not sure how to interpret the rest of your comments, so I will refrain from doing so.

Changed in coreutils (Ubuntu):
importance: Undecided → Low
status: New → Triaged
Revision history for this message
A. Eibach (andi3) wrote :

Your bypass did not work at all, but thanks to the debbug entry you linked, I got two working variants now:

(fully compatible, anywhere)

$ info '(coreutils) cat invocation'

(note: might not work everywhere)

$ info Coreutils 'cat invocation'

Revision history for this message
A. Eibach (andi3) wrote :

OK, this one-liner has to do the trick for me, until this is fixed downstream:

#!/bin/bash
[[ $1 == "" ]] || info Coreutils "$1 invocation"

Wish this could be made an alias, but this is impossible since the variable is _inside_ instead of at EOL

Bug Watch Updater (bug-watch-updater)
Changed in coreutils:
status: Unknown → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Pádraig Brady (p-draigbrady) wrote :

Downstream debian 8.23 package could rename the coreutils node to avoid that issue.

Bug Watch Updater (bug-watch-updater)
Changed in coreutils:
status: Confirmed → Fix Released
Revision history for this message
A. Eibach (andi3) wrote :

Nice ... just wondering if this "fix" wouldn't have to be rolled back again soon since roughly 100 tools have been recompiled after the recent change(s)?

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