Subject: bug#27833: 25.2; Add support for manpath command to woman.el

From: Reuben Thomas <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 26 Jul 2017 15:33:52 +0100

On 26 July 2017 at 15:26, Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> wrote:

> > From: Reuben Thomas <[email-masked]>
> > Date: Tue, 25 Jul 2017 23:41:03 +0100
> >
> > The attached patch against git master adds support for the man-db
> > manpath command to woman.el.
> >
> > For now, this can actually be better than using man, as man -k/apropos
> > does not currently support man directories lacking a database or whatis
> > file, which is typical for directories derived from PATH.
>
> Could you please provide a rationale for this addition?
>
> It sounds strange to me to enhance woman.el, whose main purpose is to
> work without ("wo") 'man', including on systems where 'man' is not
> easily available, by making it run 'manpath'.  If something is wrong
> with woman-manpath's built-in database, why cannot we extend it by
> adding potential candidates to those already existing there?
>

​You're right about woman being designed to run without man, I hadn't
thought of that.

There's nothing wrong with woman-manpath's built-in database. The idea is
simply to use "manpath"'s extra functionality, which looks for man pages in
directories formed from the directories on PATH.

I guess the logical thing to do would therefore be to replicate this
functionality directly, but I don't propose to do it.​

> On top of that, I think we semi-deprecated woman.el because AFAIR it
> cannot support newer roff features which are abundant in recent man
> pages.  So I wonder what kind of use case do you have that on the one
> hand needs woman.el, and OTOH finds its manpath emulation lacking.
>
​
​I explained  that: man -k does not support man directories lacking a
database.

I've fixed that for my own purposes by running "mandb" as a per-user
cronjob, so I suggest you can ignore this patch (which I agree is
ill-conceived), and close the bug report.

Thanks as always for your penetrating analysis.

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