mandoc & mandocdb on Mac OS X

mandoc & mandocdb on Mac OS X

[Kristaps Dzonsons]

Hi,

Thought I'd drop a note to all with OSX who want mandoc goodness instead 
of the defaults for apropos and so on.  This can be easily modified to 
only affect the local user, but I want to make it the system default. 
(As noted to tech@, there's a certain failure with mmap() in running 
some commands, but this should be fixed soon, so I won't mention it here.)

First, uncomment "USE_MANPATH" in the Makefile.  Then make (or remake) 
and install with the usual make install.  (All binaries dumped into 
/usr/local now.)

Aside: I also uncommented the CFLAGS and DBLIB to include /usr/local as 
I've compiled a more recent SQLite in there.  The default SQLite doesn't 
have SQLITE_DETERMINISTIC.  I don't know how much of a difference this 
makes, however.

Prep the makewhatis database.

  $ sudo /usr/local/sbin/makewhatis

Optionally add this to the /etc/weekly.local file.  Note that the system 
makewhatis (via makewhatis.local) will also run weekly as stipulated in 
/etc/periodic/weekly.

Then make sure that apropos and whatis point to mandoc's versions of the 
same.  You can either replace the in-system binaries or alias.  (Note: 
if you alias, running apropos via man won't work with the new system.)

Finally, we need to de-funk man-db:

  $ alias man='man -c -p ""'

This makes the formatter be run each time (-c) and suppresses 
preprocessors (-p "").  Next, to continue de-funkifying, we need not 
only to replace nroff with mandoc in /etc/man.conf, but to decline the 
"help" that man-db gives us in line lengths in a way that I can't 
disable but that triggers -man mode instead of -mdoc:

  NROFF           tail -n +2 | /usr/local/bin/mandoc

That's it!  NOTE: not all manuals play well with mandoc!  Specifically, 
the OpenGL manuals look like butts.  I don't know why yet.  Perhaps, in 
converting from DocBook, they didn't use docbook2mdoc...

(Aside number two.  It's because the OpenGL docbook input use a lot of 
<inlineequation>, which docbook2mdoc doesn't understand enough to 
convert to eqn.  In turn, mandoc's eqn wouldn't understand enough of the 
eqn itself...  Any takers?)

Best,

Kristaps
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