[arch-general] FS#73728 - Installing mandoc uninstalls certain doc-only packages (dependency issue)

[Kelvin M. Klann]

Greetings.

Some packages are currently affected by Arch bug FS#73728[1].  It seems that
not all of the relevant package maintainers were added to the bug report, so I
figured that I'd send the bug status to a mailing list and copy whoever is
missing.  I'm not sure if this is relevant to arch-dev-public, so I'm sending
it to arch-general.  Apologies if it's not the correct list.

Here's a partial quoting of the issue[1]:

> Both man-db and mandoc provide "man" and also conflict with each other.
>
> And there are documentation-only packages which depend on "man-db" rather
> than on just "man".
>
> This prevents installing both mandoc (instead of man-db) and these
> documentation-only packages at the same time.
>
> Note: "man-db" provides only man(1) and related tools; the "default" man
> pages themselves are provided by "man-pages".

Suggested fix: Change all of the following packages to depend on "man" rather
than on "man-db":

* man-pages-zh_cn
* man-pages-zh_tw
* man2html
* xorg-docs

Note: The following packages were already fixed[2][3]:

* bat-extras
* man-pages-cs
* man-pages-da
* man-pages-de
* man-pages-es
* man-pages-fr
* man-pages-hu
* man-pages-it
* man-pages-mk
* man-pages-nl
* man-pages-pl
* man-pages-pt_br
* man-pages-ro

Note2: In the case of man2html, it does not call man(1); you have to call it
yourself and pass the output to man2html.  From man2html(1):

>        Typical Usage:
>
>        man2html[-options]  < infile   > outfile
>
>        man topic | man2html [-options]  > outfile

I have tested it with both man-db and mandoc:

    $ yes | sudo pacman -Sdd man-db >/dev/null 2>&1
    $ man /usr/share/man/man1/tr.1.gz | man2html >tr_mandb.1.html
    $ yes | sudo pacman -Sdd mandoc >/dev/null 2>&1
    $ man /usr/share/man/man1/tr.1.gz | man2html >tr_mandoc.1.html

The main difference that I noticed was that with man-db, everything is put
inside a pre tag, while with mandoc it uses h2, b and pre tags for each
section.  So the output looks different, but at least the main content is
present on both.

Package versions:

* coreutils 9.0-2
* man-db 2.10.1-1
* mandoc 1.14.6-1

Cheers,

Kelvin

[1] https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/73728
[2] https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-community/commit/c4d5698c9f031547039a10f62bcce7a6653a94c8
[3] https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-community/commit/c79b07ccfa1389d58bb698fdc4bc69544b7405e2