Re: Importing the apropos GSoC code and switching to mandoc(1) by default

[Alan Barrett <apb%cequrux.com@localhost>]

On Sun, 05 Feb 2012, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
> Attached is the patch to integrate this into base and hook it into
> daily/weekly and the boot process. Old apropos/whatis can be obtained
> for now by using MKMAKEMANDB=no.
>
> This also fixes a bug found in to makemandb code when using it with
> certain packages.

Thank you.  This seems to work pretty well.

Some nits:

It highlights search terms using escape sequences, which interacts
badly with pagers:

$ man -k man | less
man(1)  display the on-line manual pages aka man pages
...ESC[1mmanESC[0m pages for a specified section and name combination.
(Normally, only the first ESC[1mmanESC[0m page found is displayed.) C
Use the specified file instead of the default configuration file. This
permits users to configure their own ESC[1mmanESC[0m environment. See
ESC[1mmanESC[0m...

The highlighting also does not pay attention to the terminal 
setting, so "TERM=hp2621 man -k man" prints ANSI escape sequences 
instead of HP escape sequences.

I'd suggest either not highlighting at all, or highlighting in a 
pager-compatible way by default, and highlighting using escape 
sequences only of the output is a tty or if requested via a 
command line option.

It prints more than a screenful of output by default.  I'd suggest 
either printing only one line per result by default, or piping 
through a pager if the output is a tty.

--apb (Alan Barrett)