From: "Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>
To: Brice Waegeneire <brice@waegenei.re>
Cc: Guix Devel <guix-devel@gnu.org>,
Maxim Cournoyer <maxim.cournoyer@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Getting rid of the mandb profile hook?
Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2021 11:20:32 +0100 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <878s6v5mz3.fsf@gnu.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <0170f58ece0b1bfd193f1566c37eddb8@waegenei.re> (Brice Waegeneire's message of "Wed, 03 Mar 2021 21:50:31 +0100")
Hi Brice,
Brice Waegeneire <brice@waegenei.re> skribis:
> On 2021-03-03 15:13, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
[...]
>> I looked a bit at man-db, thinking it must have that already done
>> more
>> or less. Indeed, one can run “mandb -uc” to create the database.
>> The problem is that it insists on writing databases and
>> ‘CACHEDIR.TAG’
>> files in the same directory as man pages. In our case, these are all
>> read-only, so just prints a warning for each directory and keeps going.
>> It looks like man-db is not written with a situation like ours in
>> mind.
>
> What about using mandoc¹, the manpage compiler from OpenBSD, instead of
> man-db? As from it's manual it support specifying the database location:
>
> “makewhatis -d dir [file ...]”²
>
> It isn't packaged in Guix yet, but other Linux distros have done it,
> some
> are even using it as their default.
Sounds like a plan! We’d need to update the “Documentation” node in the
manual accordingly.
Do you want to give it a try?
>> [...]
>> One option I contemplated at one point is to simply have fewer man
>> pages
>> in the first place. :-) There were packages that install man pages
>> when they shouldn’t. This led to commits like
>> 305eefc0627eb1d047e6fc4320d7e56897719ab8 and
>> 4b797193d7508ddc53bb1ff7a267a0d50c1fe298 (and parent commits).
>
> More outputs would be great tho having a way to force the installation
> of
> specifics outputs for every installed package would improve quality of
> live. For a specific example in that case, when installing ncurses from
> the cli it would install it's man output too if you always want man
> page
> to be installed.
Hmm sounds tricky (and kinda unpredictable, too).
Thanks,
Ludo’.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2021-03-10 10:33 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 10+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2020-12-05 18:31 Getting rid of the mandb profile hook? Ludovic Courtès
2020-12-05 18:51 ` Pierre Neidhardt
2020-12-05 20:18 ` Ryan Prior
2020-12-06 0:37 ` Ricardo Wurmus
2020-12-08 10:47 ` Ludovic Courtès
2021-02-27 13:05 ` Maxim Cournoyer
2021-03-03 14:13 ` Ludovic Courtès
2021-03-03 20:50 ` Brice Waegeneire
2021-03-10 10:20 ` Ludovic Courtès [this message]
2021-04-02 16:56 ` Ludovic Courtès
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