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

On Wed Aug 18 10, Alexander Best wrote:
> 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".

this seems to have been fixed by switching to `zcat -f`. thanks a lot. :)

i guess gnu/4419 can be closed once your script enters the tree.

cheers.
alex

> 
> 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

-- 
a13x