Re: Importing the apropos GSoC code and switching to mandoc(1) by default

[Abhinav Upadhyay <er.abhinav.upadhyay%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 5:16 AM, Joerg Sonnenberger
<joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost> wrote:
> Hi all,
> attached is the new apropos created by Abhinav Upadhyay during last
> year's Summer of Code. I've added a small whatis(1) implementation to
> round it up. This should be a functional replacement for apropos(1) and
> whatis(1). It obsoletes makewhatis(8).
>
> For the base system without xsrc, index size with default settings is
> ~~15MB. That's an index about the full man page. Limiting it to the NAME
> section cuts it to ~2MB. Default settings for the daily run etc would be
> full index.
>
> At the same time, I would like to switch to using mandoc(1) for man page
> formatting by default and disable cat page generation. Cat pages don't
> really serve a purpose any longer, since rendering even the largest
> documents is done in less than 2s (on the VAX it was tested on).
>
> At the moment, all man pages but one in base are indexed. This document
> is the groff_mmse(7) and doesn't match the pattern for the name section.
> mandoc(1) can parse all man pages in pkgsrc/current except a few
> Japanese man pages. Those mostly fail due to character set issues.
> Addressing that can and should be discussed separately. I do not intend
> to disable groff and I don't intend to remove the cat page functionality
> from man. So if a specific document renders badly or not at all, it can
> always be pre-rended with groff(1).
>
> Joerg

I noticed, there is a utility getNAME(8) which extracts the NAME
section of the man pages. Shouldn't it also go away ? Although I am
not quite sure of its  real purpose. The man page mentions that
makewhatis(8) used to use getNAME but it is no longer the case.

--
Abhinav