CFR: Replace man/manpath/whatis/apropos with a shell script
Gordon Tetlow
gordon at tetlows.org
Wed Aug 18 07:41:47 UTC 2010
All,
I sat down and rewrote the man tools from a relatively old codebase to a
single shell script. My original motivation was to allow multiple
configuration files so port installations did not have to mess with
/etc/manpath.config (like perl for example) when needing to manipulate the
manpath. After looking at the existing code, I figured I could rewrite it as
a shell script relatively easily.
Script (install as /usr/bin/man, /usr/bin/manpath, /usr/bin/apropos,
/usr/bin/whatis)
http://people.freebsd.org/~gordon/man.sh<http://people.freebsd.org/%7Egordon/man.sh>
Features of the new code:
1. BSD licensed (old code is GPL).
2. Imports configuration from /usr/local/etc/man.d/*.conf and /etc/man.conf
(purposefully changed the manpath.config file since it is a different
syntax).
3. Allows ports to override the toolset used to display the manpage based on
language. This was done to try to merge the functionality of the
japanese/man port into the base system as much as possible.
I've tried to make this mirror the functionality, directory search order,
and arguments as the current base implementation.
This brings me to my next point. I need some testers willing to try this
out. It would be particularly great if I could get some foreign language
testers with localized manpage installations. If something doesn't work the
way you expect, please contact me and I can help debug it (using man -ddd
<whatever> will generally give me the debug information I need).
Thanks,
Gordon
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