Hello, list. For the past few days I have been working on bringing mdocml to Gentoo as a full alternative to man-db. In the course of writing the ebuild, I have come across some issues on which I would like to have some comments:
1. When submitting the ebuild through bugzilla, is it enough to note that virtual/man would need changes to reflect that mdocml satisfies it, or does that warrant a new bug (with depedency on the ebuild)? 2. I have asked about the next questions on freenode's #gentoo-dev-help channel already, but got no answer: What is the reasoning to suppress the MANPATH environment variable in ebuilds? Updating/creating the mandoc database in pkg_postinst will only pick up /usr/share/man, and fully ignore the gcc and binutils manpages that are correctly set in MANPATH. This also happens to man-db, which means that the manpages gcc and binutils bring will *never* show up in apropos or man -k. I'd be glad to open a bug about this, but wanted first to know if this is actually a feature. Note that MANPATH is also not set in the cron.daily script that man-db brings. You can easily verify this bug like so: $ man fsf-funding # this will correctly display the fsf-funding manpage $ apropos fsf # this will find fsfreeze/etc, but *not* fsf-funding On my testing system that has mdocml set up (and the correct paths fed into makewhatis), apropos indeed finds fsf-funding. I have not tested this with man-db yet, but I would assume that sourcing the environment or somehow setting MANPATH in the ebuild and the cron script would fix this and add the corresponding manpages to the man-db database. And with this, we come to... 3. What would be the best way to set the MANPATH in the ebuild and the cron script? It seems to me that sourcing /etc/profile in the ebuild's pkg_postinst is a terrible hack, and in my current ebuild (see end of this mail) I resolved to just let it run on /usr/share/man and to then alert the user. My cron.daily script indeed sources /etc/profile before running makewhatis. I post this on the -user list because it seems to me that I have issues relating to several distinct components. If this is better discussed somewhere else, I would appreciate some pointers :) You can find the ebuild (and corresponding files) here: https://github.com/vehk/pramantha/tree/mdocml-wip/sys-apps/mdocml -- Wolfgang Mueller / vehk.de / GPG 0xc543cfce9465f573
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