"Richard L. Hamilton" wrote:
> > While looking at some other issue with japanese
> > manual pages on a system
> > where multiple users use different locales I hit the
> > problem that there
> > wasn't a "windex" (manual page index file) for the
> > japanese manual
> > pages:
> > -- snip --
> > $ find /usr/share/man -name windex
> > /usr/share/man/windex
> > -- snip --
> >
> > A quick check shows that "catman -w" creates the
> > manual pages if the
> > locale matches the manual page subdir, e.g.
> > -- snip --
> > $ (LC_ALL=ja_JP.UTF-8 MANPATH=/usr/share/man catman
> > -w)
> > $ find /usr/share/man -name windex
> > /usr/share/man/ja_JP.UTF-8/windex
> > /usr/share/man/windex
> > -- snip --
> >
> > Erm... is this intentional or a bug ? At least I
> > would expect that a
> > "catman -w" crawls/indexes all manual pages of all
> > locales in one
> > step... or is there a reason why this shouldn't be
> > done ?
>
> Since I don't see code in
> http://src.opensolaris.org/source/xref/onnv/onnv-gate/usr/src/cmd/man/src/man.c
> or
> http://src.opensolaris.org/source/xref/onnv/onnv-gate/usr/src/cmd/man/src/makewhatis.sh
> to do them all, I would suppose it is intentional, or at worst, an omission.
> I'd view it as a feature, since doing /usr/share/man is already slow enough.
Erm, I disagree... this and many other small nits renders the feature of
localiseable manual pages more or less defunct in a multilinguar
environment (e.g. like an university where everyone is allowed to run
his/her preferred locale). And exactly this problem then ends-up in a
problem for contributors: Why should anyone contribute translated manual
pages when noone can use them properly ?
Anyway... I'm working on a permanent solution which should handle most
of the major problems of the current /usr/bin/man suite, including:
- Doesn't handle localised manual pages and index information properly
- Doesn't support DocBook/XML manual pages
- alias pages (don't remeber their correct name ("shadow page" ?), I
mean those SolBook documents which use SGML entities to use the content
from another SolBook page) rely on an "interesting" hack in
/usr/lib/sgml/sgml2roff
- Doesn't supress malformed and duplicate entries for windex
- Doesn't report broken manual pages during windex generation
- The code is hard to maintain
- The manual page's title should be displayed somehow
- "appropos"&co. should support pattern matching
- <... some more problems...>
Unfortunately this doesn't solve all problems, e.g. Linux has some nice
stuff which gets enabled for unicode locales (e.g. en_US.UTF-8), e.g.
the use of graphical characters beyond ASCII etc. - but AFAIK one of the
next steps can handle these issues, too (unfortunately we can't use the
Linux "man" stuff since it has other problems (zh_CN.GB18030 being one
of them... ;-/ )).
[snip]
> Since probably very few of my users are likely to read man pages at all,
> let alone in other than English, I never got too worried about this; I have
> enough fun digging all man directories out of /var/sadm/install/contents,
> so as to run catman -w on all of them.
>
> I would like to see a shortcut in makewhatis to speed it up if nothing had
> changed; i.e something using find with -newer to check for subdirectories
> that were newer than the windex file. That way, it wouldn't be unreasonable
> to run something at boot or from cron to periodically update the windex files.
Known problem, however it's not easily solveable (e.g. you can't fully
rely on timestamps and still have to deal with things like (SGML/XML)
entities included from other places). AFAIK the only way to do that is
to dump the current "windex" format (which leads to the question... is
this format "Consolidation Private" ?) and create something which can
hold more entries per document (e.g. timestamps, references, included
entities etc.).
----
Bye,
Roland
--
__ . . __
(o.\ \/ /.o) roland.mainz at nrubsig.org
\__\/\/__/ MPEG specialist, C&&JAVA&&Sun&&Unix programmer
/O /==\ O\ TEL +49 641 7950090
(;O/ \/ \O;)
