Hello!

Brice Waegeneire <brice@waegenei.re> skribis:

> On 2021-03-03 15:13, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>>>> I’m thinking we could get rid of the mandb hook.  However, the

[...]

> 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

I recently packaged it, but I’m not impressed; I’m not even sure how
that’s supposed to work:

  $ guix environment --ad-hoc mandoc -- makewhatis -d /tmp/foo $(find -L ~/.guix-profile/share/man -name \*.[0-9].gz)

exits successfully but does nothing.

At this point my preference would be to build a custom tool (I’m not
aware of any existing tool like that, but if you do, please share) that
would lazily build a database, ideally full-text, and search through it;
attached a super rough example that uses Guile-Xapian and inserts man-db
synopses into a Xapian database.

The tool would index man pages and Info pages.  It would be smart enough
to index only info/man files that have actually changed (it could look
at the inode number to determine in a way that avoids unnecessary cache
invalidation).  I’m not sure how to implement this part though.  It
sounds like a good hack for our Xapian experts—I’m looking at you Arun,
Ricardo, zimoun.  :-)

Thoughts?

I’d really like to have a rough solution so we can remove the
‘manual-database’ hook in time for the release.

Thoughts?

Ludo’.