Re: mdocml version 1.12.0 available

[Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@usta.de>]

Hi Thomas,

Kristaps Dzonsons wrote on Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 03:23:03PM +0200:
> On 10/10/2011 03:05 PM, Thomas Klausner wrote:
>> On Sat, Oct 08, 2011 at 10:23:12PM +0200, Kristaps Dzonsons wrote:

>>> Among many output improvements, this release features -Tman,
>>> allowing distribution of -man UNIX manuals for legacy systems;
>>> significant upgrades to the reference manual pages; and an
>>> experimental apropos(1) working with mandocdb(8) (imported from
>>> mandoc-tools for in-tree work).

>> Very cool, thanks.
>> I wonder why apropos(1) is not installed by default though?

It's just not ready for production at this time and
might possibly clobber the apropos(1) existing on the system.

The user interface (option naming) is still completely different
from any other apropos(1), and all of the MANPATH handling is
still missing.  We have to fix that before we can install it.

See also the commit message at:
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.bin/mandoc/apropos.c#rev1.1

> Because I forgot to modify the install hook in the Makefile.  Gah.

Gah indeed...  Be thankful that you forgot it!  ;-)


> Anyway, where would mandocdb go?  makewhatis, on OpenBSD, is in
> /usr/libexec, but this doesn't seem right.

Well, for makewhatis on OpenBSD, it does seem right, because it
is not supposed to be called manually and needs not be in the PATH,
it is just called internally from /etc/weekly and from the pkg
tools.

Regarding full mandocdb(8) integration, one thing is still missing:
Parsing of preformatted manuals.  At first we will probably go the
way of keeping the old makewhatis(8), letting it do the tree walks,
letting it process the preformatted manuals itself, letting it
remember the installed source manuals and call out to mandocdb(8)
to process the latter at the end.  So from that perspective,
mandocdb(8) could be in libexec just like makewhatis(8).

The reason i put it into /usr/bin/ is that it's a hardlink to mandoc(1)
on OpenBSD, so having the two as close together as possible helps
the admin to understand what's going on and minimizes the risk of
breaking things when people start splitting filesystems.  Besides,
when as user puts his own (special-purpose, maybe smallish) man tree
into his home directory, the user might wish to generate a mandoc.db
there.  So it's not necessarily a "system utility" only, it can
also be a user utility - compare to stuff like accton, adduser,
bgpctl, chown, chroot, edquota, lpc, pkg_add, ...

Well ok, nslookup is also in /usr/sbin/, so apparently, the rules
aren't that strict.

Yours,
  Ingo
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