Colin Watson: > On Wed, Aug 21, 2019 at 05:51:00PM +0000, Niels Thykier wrote: >> Colin Watson: >>> Does this make sense to you? If so, do you have any opinions on the >>> interface? (I'm open to it being a new program rather than having to >>> stuff even more complexity into man's command-line interface, which >>> would also make it easy to detect whether the new interface is >>> available.) >> >> So basically, I envision something like any of the 4 following usage >> patterns (as a starting point): > [...] > > Thanks for the input. Something along these lines should be doable. I > would be inclined to just take multiple file names and rely on xargs > rather than bothering with "--null --files-from -". > > --suffix would, I think, want to strip off any compression extension > before appending the suffix. >
True. >> In all cases, I assume that compression is retained (e.g. if the file >> was gzip compressed, then the output file should be as well. This is an >> assumption in the current dh_installman as well) > > This is a bit fiddly: man-db currently knows how to decompress files but > never needs to compress them. Are you sure this is necessary? Firstly, > dh_compress is normally run after dh_installman; secondly, as far as I > can see this is *not* in fact an assumption in the current > dh_installman, and indeed it takes care to remove compressed pages > before renaming the (uncompressed) output files over the input files. > You would be right; I was confused by a s/// that was used in a conditional (which I read as a m//). >> The tool could be man itself with a special flag. Though I can >> appreciate your comment about man's command-line interface being >> complex, so it might indeed be better to do it as a separate tool for >> that reason alone. > > I think I might actually extend manconv instead; it already does a > certain amount of what you need here and just needs autodetection of > input encoding and the multiple-files interface. > > manconv is currently installed in man-db's libexecdir, but I could > easily move it onto $PATH. Since it isn't currently on $PATH, that > would provide you with an easy way to test whether this new interface is > supported (I could also add "manconv --has-bulk" or something, but I > don't think it's necessary in this case). > SGTM. :) Thanks, ~Niels
