Re: Fact: mdoc is awesome.

[Kristaps Dzonsons <kristaps@bsd.lv>]

> With this last version, as mentioned, it's now easy to interface with
> mandoc(3) and parse manuals.
>
> This is still a work-in-progress, as many areas aren't documented or are
> rough around the edges. For example, parsed manuals represent "soft"
> hyphens with an obscure byte sequence, and this isn't [yet] documented
> anywhere. Like I said, work-in-progress, so if you're suddenly inspired
> to write a whiz-bang manual thingy, think twice...
>
> That said, I've written a whiz-bang manual thingy that might interest
> you. I plan on using this as an mdoc propoganda tool at BSDCan this
> year, but I'd like to air it for suggestions here, first. Please keep it
> to yourselves, as I don't want to ruin the fun...
>
> http://mdocml.bsd.lv/mandoc-cgi/
>
> This is basically a semantic search over manuals, piping requested
> manuals through mandoc. You can search, for, say, all manuals that
> mention <unistd.h> as an includes:
>
> http://mdocml.bsd.lv/cgi-bin/mandoc.cgi?key=unistd.h&type=incl
>
> or find where that pesky optarg variable is documented:
>
> http://mdocml.bsd.lv/cgi-bin/mandoc.cgi?key=optarg&type=var
>
> Handy stuff.
>
> Here's the bad news. -man documents are, for the time being, completely
> left out. I'll do some rinky-dink heuristics to grab the name of a
> manual, but for the most part it's just unstructured text.
>
> Anyway, please post any suggestions or comments you may have! There's a
> lot of work that needs to be done---the tool is brand new---but I'd
> really appreciate your [reasonable] input on what you think is useful.
> Joerg, I know, is gunning for full-text search...

A small update... mandoc-db.c can now also do some preliminary -man 
stuff, parsing out NAME information.  In fact, I think this about 
catches all -man NAME stuff.  So, for example, the g++ manual is now 
available as grabbed from the GNU sources:

http://mdocml.bsd.lv/cgi-bin/mandoc.cgi?key=g%2B%2B

Note that escapes (e.g., \s, \f) are still passing through mandoc-db. 
This will require some heavier work, which will come soon.

Kristaps
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