Re: makemandb errors from pkgsrc

[Dave Huang <khym%azeotrope.org@localhost>]

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.
--
Name: Dave Huang         |  Mammal, mammal / their names are called /
INet: khym%azeotrope.org@localhost |  they raise a paw / the bat, the cat /
FurryMUCK: Dahan         |  dolphin and dog / koala bear and hog -- TMBG
Dahan: Hani G Y+C 36 Y++ L+++ W- C++ T++ A+ E+ S++ V++ F- Q+++ P+ B+ PA+ 
PL++