Re: CFR: Replace man/manpath/whatis/apropos with a shell script

On Wed Aug 18 10, Gordon Tetlow wrote:
> All,
> 
> I sat down and rewrote the man tools from a relatively old codebase to a
> single shell script. My original motivation was to allow multiple
> configuration files so port installations did not have to mess with
> /etc/manpath.config (like perl for example) when needing to manipulate the
> manpath. After looking at the existing code, I figured I could rewrite it as
> a shell script relatively easily.
> 
> Script (install as /usr/bin/man, /usr/bin/manpath, /usr/bin/apropos,
> /usr/bin/whatis)
> http://people.freebsd.org/~gordon/man.sh<http://people.freebsd.org/%7Egordon/man.sh>

wow! that's great. thanks a lot. :)

could you have a look at gnu/4419? although your script seems to fix this issue
partially, when *.[0-9] and *[0-9].gz manuals exist it will choose the
uncompressed file and complain with "not in gzip format".

it would be nice if your script would prefer compressed over uncompressed
manuals.

however i'm not sure if a different approach might be better. people with more
in depth knowledge might want to comment on this.

cheers.
alex

> 
> Features of the new code:
> 
> 1. BSD licensed (old code is GPL).
> 2. Imports configuration from /usr/local/etc/man.d/*.conf and /etc/man.conf
> (purposefully changed the manpath.config file since it is a different
> syntax).
> 3. Allows ports to override the toolset used to display the manpage based on
> language. This was done to try to merge the functionality of the
> japanese/man port into the base system as much as possible.
> 
> I've tried to make this mirror the functionality, directory search order,
> and arguments as the current base implementation.
> 
> This brings me to my next point. I need some testers willing to try this
> out. It would be particularly great if I could get some foreign language
> testers with localized manpage installations. If something doesn't work the
> way you expect, please contact me and I can help debug it (using man -ddd
> <whatever> will generally give me the debug information I need).
> 
> Thanks,
> Gordon

-- 
a13x