Re: makemandb errors from pkgsrc

[Iain Hibbert <plunky%rya-online.net@localhost>]

On Mon, 5 Mar 2012, Dave Huang wrote:

>
> On Mar 5, 2012, at 2:29 PM, Iain Hibbert wrote:
> > Essentially, the manpage has markup errors which makemandb complains about
> > rather than ignore silently. You may find that mandoc also complains about
> > them but since that is during package creation (and only if catpages are
> > installed) you won't have noticed (try "mandoc -Tlint" on them)
>
> While that probably is the case, what was the fix that Christos had
> mentioned in
> http://mail-index.netbsd.org/current-users/2012/02/27/msg019271.html ?

I believe, the warnings were reduced somewhat

> It seems like regardless of whether NetBSD fixes the manpages in pkgsrc,
> Julio Merino's original comment of "why should I, as an admin of a given
> machine, care about them? There is not much I can do about the errors,

but of course there is.. as the admin of the machine, you can

1. edit the files and fix the problems
2. add patches to pkgsrc and rebuild packages
3. forward errors back to authors

(or, wait for others to do the same and reap the benefits)

> and seeing them in every single daily report is annoying" still applies.

Ha, that is true.. but sometimes, making the warning annoying is to the
benefit of all. There was one for a software that I wrote, so I've updated
the source and made a new release.

> This particular machine doesn't have anything in /usr/local/man, but
> what if it did happen to have a bad manpage there? /usr/local/man is
> listed in /etc/mk.conf, so I assume makemandb would try to index it and
> complain.

Yes, that sounds reasonable.. if you install something locally that a
parsing tool you ask to run daily cannot parse, then it should warn and
you can fix it?

> It seems like it'd be better for makemandb to be quieter by
> default

of course you can also set run_makemandb=NO in /etc/daily.conf to stop
that indexing entirely, and will get no daily message about problems (I
notice this is not documented in daily.conf(5) but it should be)

The issue here is really, that while apropos only previously cared about
the the page description, now it parses the whole page and if there is
something it cannot understand it complains about it. But the benefit is
that the whole page is indexed! This is a new thing that we never had! The
errors are temporary, but they do need to be present to encourage more
people to get fixing the problems this has revealed. We cannot simply
suppose that Joerg will do everything..

iain