* bug#5578: 23.1.92; M-x man should consider $MANPATH when making completions
@ 2010-02-13 23:48 jidanni
2010-02-14 1:29 ` Chong Yidong
` (3 more replies)
0 siblings, 4 replies; 9+ messages in thread
From: jidanni @ 2010-02-13 23:48 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: 5578; +Cc: rfrancoise
M-x man should consider $MANPATH when making completions. It (via
/usr/bin/man) finds the pages fine, but one must type them in without
any TAB completion help. The TAB completion should examine one's e.g.,
MANPATH=/usr/local/man:/home/jidanni/.spamassassin-tree/man: too.
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 9+ messages in thread* bug#5578: 23.1.92; M-x man should consider $MANPATH when making completions 2010-02-13 23:48 bug#5578: 23.1.92; M-x man should consider $MANPATH when making completions jidanni @ 2010-02-14 1:29 ` Chong Yidong 2010-02-14 6:12 ` jidanni ` (2 subsequent siblings) 3 siblings, 0 replies; 9+ messages in thread From: Chong Yidong @ 2010-02-14 1:29 UTC (permalink / raw) To: jidanni; +Cc: rfrancoise, 5578 jidanni@jidanni.org writes: > M-x man should consider $MANPATH when making completions. It (via > /usr/bin/man) finds the pages fine, but one must type them in without > any TAB completion help. The TAB completion should examine one's e.g., > MANPATH=/usr/local/man:/home/jidanni/.spamassassin-tree/man: too. It does complete, using `man -k'. Please provide a proper bug report. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 9+ messages in thread
* bug#5578: 23.1.92; M-x man should consider $MANPATH when making completions 2010-02-13 23:48 bug#5578: 23.1.92; M-x man should consider $MANPATH when making completions jidanni 2010-02-14 1:29 ` Chong Yidong @ 2010-02-14 6:12 ` jidanni 2010-02-14 8:57 ` Colin Watson 2010-02-14 16:30 ` Stefan Monnier 2010-02-14 21:06 ` jidanni 2010-02-15 14:47 ` jidanni 3 siblings, 2 replies; 9+ messages in thread From: jidanni @ 2010-02-14 6:12 UTC (permalink / raw) To: cyd, man-db; +Cc: rfrancoise, 5578 >>>>> "CY" == Chong Yidong <cyd@stupidchicken.com> writes: CY> jidanni@jidanni.org writes: >> M-x man should consider $MANPATH when making completions. It (via >> /usr/bin/man) finds the pages fine, but one must type them in without >> any TAB completion help. The TAB completion should examine one's e.g., >> MANPATH=/usr/local/man:/home/jidanni/.spamassassin-tree/man: too. CY> It does complete, using `man -k'. Please provide a proper bug report. $ man -w whoami /usr/share/man/man1/whoami.1.gz $ man -k whoami whoami (1) - print effective userid $ man -w sa-update /home/jidanni/.spamassassin-tree/man/man1/sa-update.1p $ man -k sa-update $ Well, OK, but to change things, the user must probably fiddle with /etc/manpath.config and run roots cronjob, when all he wants to do is expand the names and not look at the definitions... Just like one can expand the names of $PATH, why not $MANPATH... ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 9+ messages in thread
* bug#5578: 23.1.92; M-x man should consider $MANPATH when making completions 2010-02-14 6:12 ` jidanni @ 2010-02-14 8:57 ` Colin Watson 2010-02-14 16:30 ` Stefan Monnier 1 sibling, 0 replies; 9+ messages in thread From: Colin Watson @ 2010-02-14 8:57 UTC (permalink / raw) To: jidanni; +Cc: cyd, rfrancoise, man-db, 5578 On Sun, Feb 14, 2010 at 02:12:31PM +0800, jidanni@jidanni.org wrote: > $ man -w whoami > /usr/share/man/man1/whoami.1.gz > $ man -k whoami > whoami (1) - print effective userid > $ man -w sa-update > /home/jidanni/.spamassassin-tree/man/man1/sa-update.1p > $ man -k sa-update > $ > > Well, OK, but to change things, the user must probably fiddle with > /etc/manpath.config and run roots cronjob, when all he wants to do is > expand the names and not look at the definitions... Not at all. Run mandb as your ordinary user and then 'man -k' will work. You may only care about the names, but if M-x man currently searches definitions as well then that means a number of users have almost certainly got used to that, and 'man -k' seems like a reasonable way to do that kind of thing. Having to make sure the database is up to date seems like a not unreasonable price to pay, given that user manual hierarchies are comparatively rare. -- Colin Watson [cjwatson@debian.org] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 9+ messages in thread
* bug#5578: 23.1.92; M-x man should consider $MANPATH when making completions 2010-02-14 6:12 ` jidanni 2010-02-14 8:57 ` Colin Watson @ 2010-02-14 16:30 ` Stefan Monnier 2010-02-15 8:41 ` Colin Watson 1 sibling, 1 reply; 9+ messages in thread From: Stefan Monnier @ 2010-02-14 16:30 UTC (permalink / raw) To: jidanni; +Cc: cyd, rfrancoise, man-db, 5578 > $ man -w whoami > /usr/share/man/man1/whoami.1.gz > $ man -k whoami > whoami (1) - print effective userid > $ man -w sa-update > /home/jidanni/.spamassassin-tree/man/man1/sa-update.1p > $ man -k sa-update > $ Looks like a bug/misfeature in the `man' program, then. Of course, man.el could try to work around this limitation, but I think we first should try to get it fixed. Stefan ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 9+ messages in thread
* bug#5578: 23.1.92; M-x man should consider $MANPATH when making completions 2010-02-14 16:30 ` Stefan Monnier @ 2010-02-15 8:41 ` Colin Watson 0 siblings, 0 replies; 9+ messages in thread From: Colin Watson @ 2010-02-15 8:41 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Stefan Monnier; +Cc: cyd, jidanni, rfrancoise, man-db, 5578 On Sun, Feb 14, 2010 at 11:30:10AM -0500, Stefan Monnier wrote: > > $ man -w whoami > > /usr/share/man/man1/whoami.1.gz > > $ man -k whoami > > whoami (1) - print effective userid > > $ man -w sa-update > > /home/jidanni/.spamassassin-tree/man/man1/sa-update.1p > > $ man -k sa-update > > $ > > Looks like a bug/misfeature in the `man' program, then. > Of course, man.el could try to work around this limitation, but I think > we first should try to get it fixed. (Hi, maintainer of man-db speaking here.) In some ways it is not ideal that people have to run 'mandb' by hand before 'man -k' and similar tools work. (I believe that the other commonly-used implementation works similarly, except that the program you have to run is called 'makewhatis'.) On the other hand, some years ago (up to man-db 2.3.19, 2001 or thereabouts) man used to build its databases on the fly and the results were generally regarded as disastrous: they tended to involve lots of waiting around for interactive queries to return while the database was rebuilt. Everyone hated it. I deliberately changed this, and I'm not keen to return to the previous situation as I remember what it was like. On balance, I think I prefer the current state of the trade-off. I don't know that it's appropriate for Emacs to work around this; it clearly has some entitlement to assume that 'man -k' works. (On Debian and allied systems, system manual pages always work fine as the packaging system nowadays takes care to run mandb whenever necessary; this only affects user manual pages, which are relatively rare.) Perhaps 'man -k' ought to print a message on stderr in some circumstances telling you to run mandb, although unfortunately much of the time working out that you need to run mandb involves a substantial part of the work involved in actually running mandb, so I'm not sure whether this would be a good idea ... Regards, -- Colin Watson [cjwatson@debian.org] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 9+ messages in thread
* bug#5578: 23.1.92; M-x man should consider $MANPATH when making completions 2010-02-13 23:48 bug#5578: 23.1.92; M-x man should consider $MANPATH when making completions jidanni 2010-02-14 1:29 ` Chong Yidong 2010-02-14 6:12 ` jidanni @ 2010-02-14 21:06 ` jidanni 2010-02-15 8:45 ` Colin Watson 2010-02-15 14:47 ` jidanni 3 siblings, 1 reply; 9+ messages in thread From: jidanni @ 2010-02-14 21:06 UTC (permalink / raw) To: cjwatson; +Cc: 5578-close, cyd, rfrancoise, man-db >>>>> "CW" == Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> writes: CW> Run mandb as your ordinary user OK, I found that works and am closing the bug. Maybe that should be documented in emacs as at least working on Debian. (I discovered it makes files inside my private man tree... the mandb page perhaps isn't that clear about that.) ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 9+ messages in thread
* bug#5578: 23.1.92; M-x man should consider $MANPATH when making completions 2010-02-14 21:06 ` jidanni @ 2010-02-15 8:45 ` Colin Watson 0 siblings, 0 replies; 9+ messages in thread From: Colin Watson @ 2010-02-15 8:45 UTC (permalink / raw) To: jidanni; +Cc: cyd, rfrancoise, man-db, 5578 On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 05:06:06AM +0800, jidanni@jidanni.org wrote: > >>>>> "CW" == Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> writes: > CW> Run mandb as your ordinary user > OK, I found that works and am closing the bug. Maybe that should be > documented in emacs as at least working on Debian. The bug title here is incorrect anyway; there's nothing Emacs is doing that would avoid honouring $MANPATH, and that was never related to your problem. This isn't Debian-specific. > (I discovered it makes files inside my private man tree... the mandb page > perhaps isn't that clear about that.) I don't think it needs to be. It's creating an index for your private manual hierarchy; either (a) it should be obvious that this would live within your private manual hierarchy, since where else would it go or (b) you should not need to care. :-) -- Colin Watson [cjwatson@debian.org] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 9+ messages in thread
* bug#5578: 23.1.92; M-x man should consider $MANPATH when making completions 2010-02-13 23:48 bug#5578: 23.1.92; M-x man should consider $MANPATH when making completions jidanni ` (2 preceding siblings ...) 2010-02-14 21:06 ` jidanni @ 2010-02-15 14:47 ` jidanni 3 siblings, 0 replies; 9+ messages in thread From: jidanni @ 2010-02-15 14:47 UTC (permalink / raw) To: cjwatson; +Cc: cyd, rfrancoise, man-db, 5578 >>>>> "CW" == Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> writes: >> (I discovered it makes files inside my private man tree... the mandb page >> perhaps isn't that clear about that.) CW> I don't think it needs to be. It's creating an index for your private CW> manual hierarchy; either (a) it should be obvious that this would live CW> within your private manual hierarchy, since where else would it go or CW> (b) you should not need to care. :-) I found 'gosh, mandb worked'. 'Now where did it store whatever it stored?' At first I thought it might be in some mode 4777 directory in /usr or /var ... nope, hmmm find ~ -mtime -1 ... ah ha, it saved it right under my nose. Anyway, I made a anacrontab to remind me to run it (mandb) as me (user 1000) every 444 days. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 9+ messages in thread
end of thread, other threads:[~2010-02-15 14:47 UTC | newest] Thread overview: 9+ messages (download: mbox.gz follow: Atom feed -- links below jump to the message on this page -- 2010-02-13 23:48 bug#5578: 23.1.92; M-x man should consider $MANPATH when making completions jidanni 2010-02-14 1:29 ` Chong Yidong 2010-02-14 6:12 ` jidanni 2010-02-14 8:57 ` Colin Watson 2010-02-14 16:30 ` Stefan Monnier 2010-02-15 8:41 ` Colin Watson 2010-02-14 21:06 ` jidanni 2010-02-15 8:45 ` Colin Watson 2010-02-15 14:47 ` jidanni
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