Subject: Re: 24.3.50; [PATCH] man page completion support beyond man-db

From: Kevin Ryde <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2012 08:19:59 +1100

Stefan Monnier <[email-masked]> writes:
>
> different `man' construct their MANPATH from different places).

Yes.  There's a bit in woman.el to attempt it and even
/etc/manpath.conf.  But that misses aliases when the page lists two
names in its NAME part.  In debian there's normally symlinks for such,
but it's possible they're only in the man index extracted by "lexgrog".

I reckoned it better to ask "man" what pages it knows, if it can give
its index in a reasonable way.  The "whatis" program might be an
alternative, or it might be the same.

Wolfgang Jenkner <[email-masked]> writes:
>
> boot-scripts (7) [boot] - General description of boot sequence

Some version of man-db printed that for me, but the aliases or the
output have changed now.

> +(defvar Man-keyword-completion-twiddle
> +  (cond
> +   ;; man-db-* or man-*.
> +   ((memq system-type '(gnu gnu/linux gnu/kfreebsd))
> +    "^")
> +   (t
> +    ""))

You'd much prefer to avoid that.  For a start `system-type' is probably
unreliable to distinguish the flavour of man.  The outputs look close
enough / different enough for a single parse/split/etc.

> +tset, reset (1)    - establish or restore terminal characteristics"

Thanks, I'll see if I can recognise some of those for my stuff too.