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Re: makemandb errors from pkgsrc



On 3/6/2012 4:04 AM, Iain Hibbert wrote:
 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

I still maintain that the admin is the wrong person to receive these reports. The manpage author is the person who needs to see the error. And if "edit the files and fix the problems" is supposed to be one of the options, I think the error message needs to be much more informative. E.g., an error from a file that's distributed with NetBSD (not pkgsrc):

makemandb: Error in indexing /usr/share/man/man7/groff_mmse.7

OK, so there's an error. What's the error? Maybe if it told me what the problem was, I could try to fix it. The page is Swedish--is that the problem? If so, there's nothing I can do about that--Swedish is a fine language, and I think the Swedes should be allowed to have manpages too :)

 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?

Just because I installed it doesn't mean I can fix it. I just run "make install" and it shows up in /usr/local--learning nroff isn't a prerequisite, nor should it 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..

And as I said, if makemandb can't parse the whole page, it should just parse the page description and leave it at that, unless some sort of verbose option is given. I agree that the new full-text search is great, but when it's not possible, it shouldn't behave any worse than what we had before.
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