[Bug 1001189] Re: 'man' command fails with lseek error

[Paul Crawford]

Trying to be positive, we have a possible work-around for our own system (drop /packages/local/bin from $PATH) but it is not really a decent fix. The underlying problem is difficult in that all current 32-bit and 64-bit DB files look similar, so work on an improved libgdbm3 is going to be difficult to manage that discrimination.
So what is the best option for the 'man' command? Should it ignore the $PATH search for index.db files and stick to those locations configured locally (e.g. by $MANPATH and/or /etc/manpath.config)?
Or still scan $PATH but ignore any files on network drives (that are potentially generated by another word-size machine)?

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1001189

Title:
  'man' command fails with lseek error

Status in “man-db” package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  When trying to look up the on-line documentation using the 'man'
  command it fails on 12.04 with lseek error. For example:

  $ man resolvconf
  gdbm fatal: lseek error

  This lseek error applies to other requests as well (e.g. ls, fdisk,
  etc). System information is:

  $ lsb_release -rd
  Description:	Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
  Release:	12.04

  apt-cache policy man
  man:
    Installed: (none)
    Candidate: (none)
    Version table:

  However, it is installed since it runs as a command, and I find:

  $ which man
  /usr/bin/man

  $ man --version
  man 2.6.1

  What I expect is to read the manual page appropriate to the
  command/program, and not get a software error.

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