Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2011 14:45:23 +0200
From: Paul Onyschuk <blink@bojary.koba.pl>
To: alpine-devel@lists.alpinelinux.org
Subject: Re: [alpine-devel] [apkbuild] mdocml - man page tool
Message-Id: <20110602144523.bfe3a323.blink@bojary.koba.pl>
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I founded man(1)/apropos(1)/whatis(1) commands written in pure shell
script. They were created by Gordon Tetlow, and can by obtained from
FreeBSD -HEAD repository[1].

They're bigger than Busybox man(1), but with them mdocml package could
be stanalone man toolset. File mk.sh could be copied to /usr/libexec
and symlinked to /usr/bin/man, /usr/bin/apropos and /usr/bin/whatis.

This way conflicts with groff man toolset could be avioded to some
degree and user has choice of using groff or mdocml.

Script requires some works, because it's groff oriented and using groff
is all about pipes (if anyone wondered why it's so slow), example:

$ /usr/bin/zcat -f /usr/share/man/man1/some-man.1 | tbl \
| groff -S -P-c -Wall -mtty-char -man -Tascii | /usr/bin/col | less

And mdocml (tbl and eqn are build-in) example:

$ mandoc -Tascii /usr/share/man/man1/some-man.1 | less

This modification can be applied pretty easy (I've working copy). Some
other features of mk.sh can be removed:

- Support for so called cat pages (preformated man pages)
- Support for localized man pages / AFAIK uclibc doesn't support locales
- Some other minor things like platform specific lookups (searching for
x86/x86_64 in section(4))

What is the point of all of this:

- groff binaries are ~8.5MB (I don't count man(1) implementation, which
isn't small either), where Apline Linux base system can be under 10MB
- mdocml binary is ~230KB and mk.sh is ~20KB
- mdocml is good enough replacment - some man pages can misbehave, but
mdocml is geting better every day and there is also problem with badly
formated man pages
- mdocml is much much faster, to get more groff-like feeling use:
	$ sleep 0.7 && mandoc /usr/share/man/man1/some-man.1 | less

I'm going into wilderness for few days, so this work will be postponed.

[1] http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/usr.bin/man/

-- 
Paul Onyschuk <blink@bojary.koba.pl>


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