Re: mandocdb: handle formatted manuals

[Kristaps Dzonsons <kristaps@bsd.lv>]

On 11/19/11 01:56, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
> Hi,
>
> right, extracting information from formatted manuals is a rather
> dirty business and never going to be that reliable, but there is
> no choice:  Sometimes, nothing else is available, and we have to
> deal with it.  Of course, on OpenBSD, we could leave that dirty
> work to espie@'s OpenBSD::Makewhatis perl modules, but i'd rather
> have a portable solution, and i'd rather not have makewhatis(8)
> split into two pieces.  I still hope that mandocdb(8) can replace
> makewhatis(8) completely (except for the pkg_add(1)/pkg_delete(1)/
> pkg_create(1)-integration of course, which is not going to be
> portable given how different pkg_add and pkgsrc are).
>
> So here is what i did on my train ride from the p2k11 ports hackathon
> in Budapest back to Karlsruhe (including the one hour lockup in
> Hegyeshalom when the locomotive stopped working, grrr):
>
>   * Even without -a, walk the cat* dirs in addition to man*.
>   * Only use those cats where men^Wmans are not available
>     because mans are just greater than cats.
>
> There is still a lot of room for improvement, several features of
> OpenBSD::Makewhatis are not yet implemented.  However, this is
> already working in most respects, and i'd like to put it in for
> in-tree polishing.

Hi Ingo,

There's a slight problem with this: when a file is entered into 
mandocdb's databases, there's an implicit assumption that it was parsed. 
  In other words, mandocdb entries are "safe" for mandoc.

We need to clearly demark which files are "safe" and which are not.  In 
this way, progs interfacing with mandocdb databases can act accordingly.

The easiest way, of course, is a bit in the index file.  Can you modify 
this patch, and the mandoc.index format, to do something like that?

While we're updating the mandoc.index format, is there anything else 
that should be going in there?

Thoughts?

Kristaps
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