[arch-dev-public] replace man with man-db?
This was brought up a while ago: http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/9130 There's a usable man-db pkg in AUR that could replace man in core after some testing. I haven't heard of many issues with localized man-pages. Reading around Gentoo and Fedora still use "man" while Debian only provides "man-db". There are many patches in the Fedora cvs to solve the claimed issues with man. We have not one bug report for our "man" package. What's your opinion? Should we stay with "man" and fix what will be reported or satisfy the replacement request. I'd like to stay with our man until we can't fix something. -Andy
On Mon, 2008-12-22 at 18:57 +0100, Andreas Radke wrote:
What's your opinion? Should we stay with "man" and fix what will be reported or satisfy the replacement request.
I'd like to stay with our man until we can't fix something.
If we want to switch to man-db, note that we have to update the man database after installing a package with manpages. I'm not comfortable with updating every package in our repository with such a command.
On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 12:03 PM, Jan de Groot <jan@jgc.homeip.net> wrote:
On Mon, 2008-12-22 at 18:57 +0100, Andreas Radke wrote:
What's your opinion? Should we stay with "man" and fix what will be reported or satisfy the replacement request.
I'd like to stay with our man until we can't fix something.
If we want to switch to man-db, note that we have to update the man database after installing a package with manpages. I'm not comfortable with updating every package in our repository with such a command.
Eww, I didn't know that. I much prefer 'man' then if that's the case. install-info is already annoying enough 8)
Am Mon, 22 Dec 2008 19:03:19 +0100 schrieb Jan de Groot <jan@jgc.homeip.net>:
I'd like to stay with our man until we can't fix something.
If we want to switch to man-db, note that we have to update the man database after installing a package with manpages. I'm not comfortable with updating every package in our repository with such a command.
That's a big disadvantage when true. But it could probably be covered with a feature in pacman checking for man- and info-files after each pkg installation. Sure it would have to be done by someone first. -Andy
Am Montag 22 Dezember 2008 19:17:14 schrieb Andreas Radke:
Am Mon, 22 Dec 2008 19:03:19 +0100
schrieb Jan de Groot <jan@jgc.homeip.net>:
I'd like to stay with our man until we can't fix something.
If we want to switch to man-db, note that we have to update the man database after installing a package with manpages. I'm not comfortable with updating every package in our repository with such a command.
That's a big disadvantage when true. But it could probably be covered with a feature in pacman checking for man- and info-files after each pkg installation. Sure it would have to be done by someone first.
-Andy
Some generic hook method in pacman wouldnÄt be a bad idea here. We already have info-pages, mime-types and icons which need some post_install magic. -- Pierre Schmitz Clemens-August-Straße 76 53115 Bonn Telefon 0228 9716608 Mobil 0160 95269831 Jabber pierre@jabber.archlinux.de WWW http://www.archlinux.de
Reply from the man-db upstream maintainer: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> Date: Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 12:30 PM Subject: Re: [arch-dev-public] replace man with man-db? To: Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin@gmail.com> Cc: arch-dev-public@archlinux.org On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 12:04:47PM -0600, Aaron Griffin wrote:
On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 11:57 AM, Andreas Radke <a.radke at arcor.de> wrote:
This was brought up a while ago: http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/9130
There's a usable man-db pkg in AUR that could replace man in core after some testing.
I haven't heard of many issues with localized man-pages. Reading around Gentoo and Fedora still use "man" while Debian only provides "man-db". There are many patches in the Fedora cvs to solve the claimed issues with man. We have not one bug report for our "man" package.
We do have a few localization bugs with regard to... Russian or Ukrainian man pages, or something...
That's not surprising, as they typically use ISO-8859-2 and getting groff to deal with anything other than ISO-8859-1 is hard work. This is the sort of area where trying to fix up man will really bite you over time, as it simply doesn't have enough of the logic you need to deal with encodings properly (you can sort of bodge it as long as there's only ever one encoding in use for a given language, I think, but that's a totally unsound assumption in the real world). I put a lot of effort into getting this right in man-db; I'll fix any such remaining problems in man-db promptly if they're reported to me. Do you use the Debian multibyte patch to groff? I concede that it's pretty gross and we've had problems getting it updated to the latest upstream version of groff, but it does work for this sort of thing (it provides an 'ascii8' device which is not entirely typographically sound but which passes through single-byte data in the same encoding). If not, you would probably need to use groff from CVS rather than the latest release, since that provides an infrastructure for converting manual pages into a neutral encoding that can be handled by groff (but it doesn't yet have enough intelligence to get things like Japanese "kinsoku shori" line-wrapping right). Regards, -- Colin Watson, man-db upstream maintainer [cjwatson@debian.org]
On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 11:57 AM, Andreas Radke <a.radke@arcor.de> wrote:
This was brought up a while ago: http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/9130
There's a usable man-db pkg in AUR that could replace man in core after some testing.
I haven't heard of many issues with localized man-pages. Reading around Gentoo and Fedora still use "man" while Debian only provides "man-db". There are many patches in the Fedora cvs to solve the claimed issues with man. We have not one bug report for our "man" package.
We do have a few localization bugs with regard to... Russian or Ukrainian man pages, or something...
What's your opinion? Should we stay with "man" and fix what will be reported or satisfy the replacement request.
I'd like to stay with our man until we can't fix something.
It's not so much about fixing things, it's more about the fact that localized man pages seem to be regarded as "better" with man-db. I personally don't think my opinion should matter here, as I can only read the english man pages anyway 8)
Am Mon, 22 Dec 2008 12:04:47 -0600 schrieb "Aaron Griffin" <aaronmgriffin@gmail.com>:
We do have a few localization bugs with regard to... Russian or Ukrainian man pages, or something...
must be #7477. I guess it can be solved with one of the patches in Fedora cvs. I'll can have a look once we made a decision where we want to go. -Andy
participants (4)
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Aaron Griffin
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Andreas Radke
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Jan de Groot
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Pierre Schmitz