Re: bin/45980: Manual file indexing no longer supports compressed manual pages

[Abhinav Upadhyay <er.abhinav.upadhyay%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Sat, Feb 11, 2012 at 7:45 PM, Matthias Scheler 
<tron%zhadum.org.uk@localhost> wrote:
> The following reply was made to PR bin/45980; it has been noted by GNATS.
>
> From: Matthias Scheler <tron%zhadum.org.uk@localhost>
> To: Jukka Ruohonen <jruohonen%iki.fi@localhost>
> Cc: gnats-bugs%NetBSD.org@localhost
> Subject: Re: bin/45980: Manual file indexing no longer supports compressed
>  manual pages
> Date: Sat, 11 Feb 2012 14:10:03 +0000
>
>  On Sat, Feb 11, 2012 at 01:45:02PM +0000, Jukka Ruohonen wrote:
>  > From: Jukka Ruohonen <jruohonen%iki.fi@localhost>
>  > To: gnats-bugs%NetBSD.org@localhost
>  > Cc: gnats-admin%NetBSD.org@localhost, netbsd-bugs%NetBSD.org@localhost, 
> tron%zhadum.org.uk@localhost
>  > Subject: Re: bin/45980: Manual file indexing no longer supports compressed 
> manual pages
>  > Date: Sat, 11 Feb 2012 15:41:17 +0200
>  >
>  >  On Sat, Feb 11, 2012 at 12:15:05PM +0000, Matthias Scheler wrote:
>  >  >  The problem isn't related to compressed manual pages. The new tool
>  >  >  e.g. insists on having an ".Nd" section in each manual page.
>  >  >  Without that section the file won't get indexed.
>  >  >
>  >  >  makewhatis(8) support this kind of manual pages without problems.
>  >
>  >  Seems like a very trivial thing to fix, and certainly not something to 
> yearn
>  >  for the old makewhatis(8) (and the associated incapable tools).
>
>  I've looked at "makemandb" and I have to disagree unfortunately.
>  It is basically only designed to parse well structured manual pages.
>  "makewhatis" had the same problem a long time ago and I fixed it
>  in the course of two years by seriously enhancing the parser.
>  Somebody would have to port all that code to "makemandb".

Yes, but makewhatis(8) used to parse only the NAME section of the man
pages. The new tools, parse almost the complete man page. The NAME
section is the key here, if the name of the man page and its one line
short description (.Nd) cannot be extracted from the man page then the
rest of the data from that man page is useless because in the database
we can't possibly identify which man page does this data belong to, so
the tool simply reports an error for such pages. However, for rest of
the sections, it tries to be as lenient as it can be (and in normal
cases it should not report errors).

However man(7) pages are a bit tricky to parse properly, it is
possible that there might be some man pages out there with NAME
section in a form that makemandb does not expect.

--
Abhinav