Re: [groff] groff as the basis for comprehensive documentation?

[Colin Watson]

On Thu, Apr 19, 2018 at 02:28:36AM +0200, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
> Nate Bargmann wrote on Wed, Apr 18, 2018 at 06:52:44PM -0500:
> > I was disappointed that unlike "man" that I find on Slackware or
> > Debian, I had to add an uninstalled man page into the db in order
> > for "mandoc" to open it.  Perhaps I missed an option, but the "man"
> > I'm familiar with is capable of opening a file simply by giving it
> > a path name.
> 
> That is non-standard behaviour even on GNU/Linux:
> 
>    $ lsb_release -d
>   Description:    Debian GNU/Linux 8.10 (jessie)
>    $ dpkg-query -l man-db | tail -n 1
>   ii  man-db         2.7.0.2-5    i386         on-line manual pager
>    $ ls *.1
>   apropos.1  demandoc.1  man.1  man.options.1  mandoc.1  soelim.1
>    $ man apropos.1        # the man-db man(1) implementation
>   No manual entry for apropos.1

"man ./apropos.1", as Nate pointed out.  man-db's heuristic is that if
the page name contains a slash then it's surely a path name instead and
should be treated as such; I think that's a reasonable one.

> I think it is good that the '-l' ("local") option is required when
> giving a file name in the local directory, or an absolute path.

I agree that man should not try to guess the difference between a page
name and an unadorned file name in the local directory (with no slash),
but when it's an absolute path or a relative path containing a slash,
the situation seems quite clear.

> Besides, with the mandoc implementation of man(1), it is not
> absolutely required to update the database even after installing a
> new page into /usr/share/man/.

You can also leave out the qualifier clause there: this is true of the
man-db implementation too.  (It used to not be true, but I fixed that
long ago, back in 2002 or so.)

-- 
Colin Watson                                       address@hidden