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


From: Colin Watson
Subject: Re: [groff] groff as the basis for comprehensive documentation?
Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2018 10:18:51 +0100
User-agent: NeoMutt/20170113 (1.7.2)

On Thu, Apr 19, 2018 at 06:48:19PM +0200, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
> Colin Watson wrote on Thu, Apr 19, 2018 at 10:06:28AM +0100:
> > "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.
> 
> Thank you for explaining the heuristic and for pointing out the
> missing feature in mandoc.  Given the existence of the -l option,
> having the heuristic is maybe not absolutely required, but i
> agree that it is not unreasonable, and we have seen that the absence
> of the heuristic can confuse casual users who are used to man-db.
> 
> So with the commit below, i added the same heuristic to mandoc.

Thanks.

> By the way, the old version of man-db in jessie exhibits a strange
> behaviour in that case, but probably that has been fixed long ago:
> 
>    $ 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
>    $ man --version
>   man 2.7.0.2
>    $ man -w man ./man.1
>   man: man-./man.1: No such file or directory
>   man: man_./man.1: No such file or directory
>   /usr/share/man/man1/man.1.gz
>   ./man.1

This is still incorrect in current versions: man(1)'s command-line
parsing is not quite as elegantly well-factored as it ought to be ...  I
don't quite have time to sort it out just now, but I've filed
https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/index.php?53708 so that I don't forget
about it.  Thanks for the report!

-- 
Colin Watson                                       address@hidden



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