Cygwin needs a man-db port

waterlan waterlan@xs4all.nl
Thu Apr 24 19:43:00 GMT 2014


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



> 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.

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

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