Cygwin needs a man-db port

[Erwin Waterlander]

op 17-04-14 20:32, Chris J. Breisch schreef:
> 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
>
> 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 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
Hi Chris,

Thanks for all the good work! I will see if I can reproduce your work 
and do some testing. First I make a new dos2unix release for Cygwin 
which comes now with several new translations of the man page, all in 
UTF-8. This will break with the standard man configuration of Cygwin. I 
will use it also for testing man-db.

My vote is also yes. Now we have already two votes :)

best regards,

Erwin Waterlander

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