Hi Patric, patric conant wrote on Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 01:32:20PM -0500:
> "During the first Toronto hackathon, I focused on the SQLite database > backend for mandocdb(8). Currently, mandocdb is still disabled in > OpenBSD-current, but it is intended to become a drop-in replacement for > the makewhatis(8) utility, providing enhanced search capabilities for > the apropos(1) manual page search utility". > > This made jump up and down, as a UNIX user on many different platforms > I'm ecstatic that such core system tools and utilities are being actively > maintained and expanded. In OpenBSD, all elementary userland utilities are actively maintained, not just mandoc(1) and friends. Sure, they don't see large numbers of commits because they are not *that* broken any longer; but, for example, otto@ committed to cp.c 10 months ago, tedu@ committed to dd.c 3 weeks ago, guenther@ committed to ln.c 3 months ago and to ls.c 4 weeks ago, naddy@ committed to mkdir.c 2 months ago, deraadt@ committed to rm.c 2 months ago (no, Theo isn't shy of grunt work), and those are just samples from src/bin, i didn't even get started on src/usr.bin. To man.c, i committed five times during the last four years, and jca@, mikeb@ and deraadt@ helped there, too. > Thanks to the "Not maintained here, let's borrow it," effect, > in a few years other systems I'm subjected to will likely have > a apropos command that's seen some development since the '80s. That's not automatic, you may have to wait a few decades. Take mandoc(1) as an example. It was imported into OpenBSD in April 2009, systematic integration started in January 2010, the OpenBSD build switched to mandoc in April 2010, groff was disconnected from the build in October 2010. NetBSD and FreeBSD expressed interest to do the same in July 2009. A DragonFly guy popped up once around the same time, then vanished again. An IllumOS guy popped up once in 2011, then vanished again. I don't think i ever heard anything from any Linux distro or MacOS. No idea about any commercial UNIX. The current state is that NetBSD and FreeBSD have the code somewhere in their trees, maintaining it loosely but not using it very actively, certainly not using it as the default manual page formatter, and i don't see any indication that they might switch any time soon. Before any system can profit from the upcoming mandocdb(8), very solid mandoc(1) integration is certainly required, but that doesn't seem to happen anywhere but here, in OpenBSD. Heck, all the Solaris clones typically don't even have mdoc(7) yet, even though that first appeared in 4.4BSD in June 1993. So, you might have to either exercise quite some patience - or use OpenBSD... Besides, as espie@ said, the switch to mandocdb(8) is not trivial, i have to be *very* careful to not impact build and search performance. Yours, Ingo
