Re: Cygwin needs a man-db port

[waterlan <waterlan@xs4all.nl>]

waterlan schreef op 2014-04-24 21:43:
> Chris J. Breisch schreef op 2014-04-17 20:32:
>> Erwin Waterlander wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>> 
>>> The major linux distributions have switched for their man system to
>>> 'man-db' (http://man-db.nongnu.org/) in favour of the classic man.
>>> 
>>> I think that Cygwin should also switch to man-db. man-db is much 
>>> better
>>> in handling man pages in different encoding.
>>> 
>>> Before man-db, libpipeline (http://libpipeline.nongnu.org/) needs to 
>>> be
>>> ported, because man-db uses it.
>>> 
>>> I have tried to port man-db to Cygwin, but I did not succeed. I got
>>> stuck in libpipeline. Did anyone else succeed?
>>> 
>> 
>> Yes. And I agree this is a good idea.
>> 
>> Dependencies: gdbm, libpipeline
>> 
>> Build dependencies: pkgconfig, check, and the typical build stuff
>> (make, gcc, etc.)
>> 
>> As I indicated earlier, I believe the current version of check is not
>> working properly.
>> 
>> Check-0.9.12 seems to work out-of-the-box. Configure with 
>> --prefix=/usr.
>> 
>> "make check" on check reports all tests passed, despite what appear to
>> be some failures. The CHANGELOG says that this version should pass all
>> tests on Cygwin. I've just subscribed to the mailing list and will
>> check on whether these failures can be ignored or not. Still, it
>> definitely appears to work better than the version we have now, which
>> only passes 1 test in the test suite.
>> 
>> Libpipeline-1.3.0 seems to work out-of-the-box. Configure with 
>> --prefix=/usr.
>> 
>> Oddly a "make check" for libpipeline-1.3.0 doesn't appear to actually
>> do anything. This was not the case for earlier versions of
>> libpipeline. Well, that's one way of getting rid of the test failures,
>> I guess.
>> 
>> Man-db-2.6.7 appears to work out-of-the-box.
>> 
>> Configuring man-db is a little harder than the other two.
>> 
>> ../man-db-2.6.7/configure --prefix=/usr --disable-setuid
>> --docdir=/usr/share/doc/man-db
> 
> When I run that I get this error:
> 
> checking for db1/db.h... no
> checking ndbm.h usability... no
> checking ndbm.h presence... no
> checking for ndbm.h... no
> configure: error: Fatal: no supported database library/header found
> 

I needed to install gdbm-devel and then I could install man-db.

> 
> 
>> If you don't add the --disable-setuid, you'll need to add a "man" user
>> to your system. If you're not using Corinna's snapshots, you'll need
>> to add the user to /etc/passwd as well.
>> 
>> I'm not sure about the --docdir switch. That seemed to be consistent
>> with Cygwin, but an actual package maintainer would be a better source
>> of info on this.
>> 
>> A couple of warnings are generated:
>> 
>> *** Warning: This system can not link to static lib archive
>> /usr/lib/libpipeline.la.
>> *** I have the capability to make that library automatically link in 
>> when
>> *** you link to this library.  But I can only do this if you have a
>> *** shared version of the library, which you do not appear to have.
>> 
>> and a similar one for libman.la.

I had the same warnings.

>> I do have shared versions of these libraries, so I'm not sure why the
>> warnings appear. I seem to recall a thread about something similar
>> recently in the Cygwin mailing lists. I may go back and check.
>> 
>> Once installed, you'll want to do a 'mandb -c' to create the database.
>> It will report numerous warnings which can generally be ignored. See
>> the manpage on mandb. This takes a while.

I got a couple of warnings. Not very much.

>> When new packages are added or updated on your system, you should run
>> 'mandb -c' again. This seems like something that should be part of
>> postinstall.

I did not do that.

As far as I could see man-db worked very well. It displayed UTF-8, 
Latin-1, and KOI8-R encoded man pages correctly.

I only tried 32 bit. I used
check 0.9.12
libpipeline 1.3.0
man-db 2.6.7.1

best regards,


>> My 32-bit Cygwin install has a lot of gzipped files and the
>> uncompressed versions under /usr/share/man. mandb didn't like that at
>> all. That is probably something I did and not a Cygwin problem.
>> 
>> Note that I've done only the most minimal of testing. make check
>> passes for man-db and I've opened a few man pages. They seem to work.
>> 
>> Obviously, someone with decision making power should decide if this is
>> something we want to add to Cygwin. My vote is yes, but that's just
>> one vote. Or maybe even zero. I'm not sure I get a vote. :)
>> 
>> Also obviously, if the decision is to go forward, these three items
>> need to be packaged up appropriately and a package maintainer
>> assigned. Check is already a Cygwin package, but needs updating.
>> 
>> Somehow I have a feeling about who will be nominated for this task.
>> 
>> What minimal testing I have done has been on both 32-bit and 64-bit
>> Cygwin 1.7.29.

-- 
Erwin Waterlander
http://waterlan.home.xs4all.nl/

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