On 21/06/2023 22:45, Thomas Wolff via Cygwin-apps wrote:
Am 16.02.2023 um 20:17 schrieb Thomas Wolff via Cygwin-apps:
Am 16.02.2023 um 19:59 schrieb Jon Turney:
On 21/01/2023 17:04, Thomas Wolff via Cygwin-apps wrote:
italic-man installs two scripts and hooks them into the workflow of
the 'man' command so that the italic attribute of manual pages is
actually displayed as italics in terminals that support it.
cygport file attached
Thanks very much for having another go at this.
I'm still not overly keen on postinstall/preremove scripts which
modify a configuration file belonging to another package, so I think
I'm going to defer to Achim on approving this.
Taking a step back, may I ask a couple of questions?
- Can this be done as a patch to man-db and/or groff?
(perhaps with a separate man-italic package which just contains a
marker file which enables the functionality?)
- (If different) how would this be done in an upstreamable way?
Thanks for taking a look.
I understand your hesitation but there are a number of zp_ postinstall
scripts around that make updates to mandb, mime db, desktop, various
caches, maybe crontab.
There's a difference between updating a cache or db of files which exist
on the filesystem after the package update and modifying a file which
might be overwritten by reinstalling or updating a different package.
Well, yes, there could be a zp_ script for man that makes this entry
to /etc/man_db.conf itself in the presence of the italic-man package.
If that's desired and someone else updates man, I will cooperate on this.
I think the installation of italic-man does this in an upstreamable
way except for the postinstall mechanism of course which seems to be
different (if existent at all) everywhere.
Thomas
I've added a zp_man-db-italic.dash postinstall script as a proposal for
man-db to address your concerns, to be found in the repository
github.com/mintty/italic-man. However, I find not documentation about
these zp_ things, it seems they are just all called after each setup. So
They are briefly covered in [1]. If that's missing some details, please
let me know and I'll see what can be done to improve it.
[1] https://cygwin.com/packaging-package-files.html#postinstall
would it actually make a difference whether the zp_ is a script of
italic-man or of man-db? I've also added a cygport file to the
repository so you can try the update if you like.
About your first question
- Can this be done as a patch to man-db and/or groff?
Do you mean the whole thing should not be a separate package at all but
completely patched into man-db?
Well, yes, that would avoid all the knots caused by post-install scripts
with uncertain ordering I'm worrying about.
Can you explain, in general terms, why this isn't a feature of stock
man-db already?
Looking forward to your opinion and that of the man-db package maintainer.
And yes, the hook works on Linux too, so it could be provided somehow
upstream.
Thanks continuing to grind away at this.
