From: Dirk Gouders <dirk@gouders.net>
To: Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@usta.de>
Cc: Alejandro Colomar <alx.manpages@gmail.com>,
Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>,
linux-man@vger.kernel.org, help-texinfo@gnu.org,
nabijaczleweli@nabijaczleweli.xyz, g.branden.robinson@gmail.com,
groff@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Accessibility of man pages
Date: Sun, 09 Apr 2023 11:50:12 +0200 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <gh1qktl6zv.fsf@gouders.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <ZDHtGq2XbJIcRMcD@asta-kit.de> (Ingo Schwarze's message of "Sun, 9 Apr 2023 00:39:22 +0200")
Hi Ingo,
Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@usta.de> writes:
> Dirk Gouders wrote on Sat, Apr 08, 2023 at 10:59:32PM +0200:
>> Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@usta.de> writes:
>>> Dirk Gouders wrote on Sat, Apr 08, 2023 at 09:48:13PM +0200:
>
>>>> Yes, it's very slow but close to `man -K`:
>>>>
>>>> find... man -K...
>>>>
>>>> real 107.45 real 96.34
>>>> user 117.06 user 70.11
>>>> sys 14.43 sys 26.86
>>>>
>>>> [a thought later]
>>>>
>>>> Oh, I found something much faster:
>>>>
>>>> $ time -p find /usr/share/man -type f | xargs bzgrep -l RLIMIT_NOFILE
>>>> [snip]
>>>>
>>>> real 24.30
>>>> user 32.34
>>>> sys 6.84
>>>>
>>>> Hmm, perhaps, someone has an explanation for this?
>
>>> These are all terribly slow IMHO.
>>>
>>> For comparison, this happens on my OpenBSD notebook, with more than
>>> five hundred optional software packages installed in addition to the
>>> complete default installation:
>>>
>>> $ time man -k any=RLIMIT_NOFILE
>>> dup, dup2, dup3(2) - duplicate an existing file descriptor
>>> getrlimit, setrlimit(2) - control maximum system resource consumption
>>> sudoers(5) - default sudo security policy plugin
>>> 0m00.21s real 0m00.00s user 0m00.03s system
>
>> Yes, this is really fast and would allow for quite interesting ways to
>> work with manual pages.
>>
>> But, OpenBSD's `man -k` operates on a makewhatis(8) database and not
>> on every single manual page or am I wrong?
>
> Yes, you are completely correct about that.
> The database format is documented here:
>
> https://man.openbsd.org/mandoc.db.5
>
> And the search syntax here:
>
> https://man.openbsd.org/apropos.1
>
> The concept works very well because in contrast to man(7), mdoc(7)
> provides substatial semantic markup (without being harder to write
> or maintain).
>
> The comparison seemed relevant to me because as far as i understood the
> intention of the thread, participants were looking for ideas to make
> searching for content in manual pages more powerful and more efficient.
> The combination of semantic markup and indexing of marked up content
> is one way to make progress in that direction, and the combination
> of mdoc(7) with mandoc(1) is an example of a system demonstrating
> the concept.
Very interesting. I gues that makewhatis(8) then has to cope both
formats (man(7) and mdoc(7)) and from between the lines I read that it
is not really a problem.
Are there any outstanding queries mdoc(7) enables that man(7) cannot?
From what I read so far with mdoc(7) it should be very easy (by querying
.Xr), for example to get an answer to the question "Which manual pages
are referencing me?" (From inside a pager, for example).
> I understand people familiar with GNU info(1) pointed out that
> providing index entries that do not correspond to marked up
> content is also occasionally useful. I do not completely disagree
> with that, and the mdoc(7) language as implemented by mandoc(1)
> provides a dedicated macro to do just that:
>
> https://man.openbsd.org/mdoc.7#Tg
My role in this thread is not an experts one but the one of a naive guy
who plays with an experimental pager (lsp(1)) that tries to offer some
additional features for handling manual pages.
I read that with .Tg tags are passed to the PAGER and with less(1) one
could use :t to navigate to them. I tried to see how this works and
wonder how the user knows which tags are available -- maybe man-db's
man(1) doesn't support this...
If your time allows and it's not too off-topic, perhaps you could
provide more detail, e.g. if I can make use of the .Tg tags on a
non-OpenBSD system.
Regards,
Dirk
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2023-04-09 9:51 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 73+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2023-03-25 20:37 Playground pager lsp(1) Dirk Gouders
2023-03-25 20:47 ` Dirk Gouders
2023-04-04 23:45 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-05 5:35 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-04-06 1:10 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-06 8:11 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-04-06 8:48 ` Gavin Smith
2023-04-07 22:01 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-08 7:05 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-04-08 13:02 ` Accessibility of man pages (was: Playground pager lsp(1)) Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-08 13:42 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-04-08 16:06 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-08 13:47 ` Colin Watson
2023-04-08 15:42 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-08 19:48 ` Accessibility of man pages Dirk Gouders
2023-04-08 20:02 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-04-08 20:46 ` Dirk Gouders
2023-04-08 21:53 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-08 22:33 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-09 10:28 ` Ralph Corderoy
2023-04-08 20:31 ` Ingo Schwarze
2023-04-08 20:59 ` Dirk Gouders
2023-04-08 22:39 ` Ingo Schwarze
2023-04-09 9:50 ` Dirk Gouders [this message]
2023-04-09 10:35 ` Dirk Gouders
[not found] ` <87a5zhwntt.fsf@ada>
2023-04-09 12:05 ` Compressed man pages (was: Accessibility of man pages (was: Playground pager lsp(1))) Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-09 12:17 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-09 18:55 ` G. Branden Robinson
2023-04-09 12:29 ` Colin Watson
2023-04-09 13:36 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-09 13:47 ` Compressed man pages Ralph Corderoy
2023-04-12 8:13 ` Compressed man pages (was: Accessibility of man pages (was: Playground pager lsp(1))) Sam James
2023-04-12 8:32 ` Compressed man pages Ralph Corderoy
2023-04-12 10:35 ` Mingye Wang
2023-04-12 10:55 ` Ralph Corderoy
2023-04-12 13:04 ` Compressed man pages (was: Accessibility of man pages (was: Playground pager lsp(1))) Kerin Millar
2023-04-12 14:24 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-12 18:52 ` Mingye Wang
2023-04-12 20:23 ` Compressed man pages Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-13 10:09 ` Ralph Corderoy
2023-04-07 2:18 ` Playground pager lsp(1) G. Branden Robinson
2023-04-07 6:36 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-04-07 11:03 ` Gavin Smith
2023-04-07 14:43 ` man page rendering speed (was: Playground pager lsp(1)) G. Branden Robinson
2023-04-07 15:06 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-04-07 15:08 ` Larry McVoy
2023-04-07 17:07 ` man page rendering speed Ingo Schwarze
2023-04-07 19:04 ` man page rendering speed (was: Playground pager lsp(1)) Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-07 19:28 ` Gavin Smith
2023-04-07 20:43 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-07 16:08 ` Colin Watson
2023-04-08 11:24 ` Ralph Corderoy
2023-04-07 21:26 ` reformatting man pages at SIGWINCH " Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-07 22:09 ` reformatting man pages at SIGWINCH Dirk Gouders
2023-04-07 22:16 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-10 19:05 ` Dirk Gouders
2023-04-10 19:57 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-10 20:24 ` G. Branden Robinson
2023-04-11 9:20 ` Ralph Corderoy
2023-04-11 9:39 ` Dirk Gouders
2023-04-17 6:23 ` G. Branden Robinson
2023-04-08 11:40 ` Ralph Corderoy
2023-04-05 10:02 ` Playground pager lsp(1) Dirk Gouders
2023-04-05 14:19 ` Arsen Arsenović
2023-04-05 18:01 ` Dirk Gouders
2023-04-05 19:07 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-04-05 19:56 ` Dirk Gouders
2023-04-05 20:38 ` A less presumptive .info? (was: Re: Playground pager lsp(1)) Arsen Arsenović
2023-04-06 8:14 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-04-06 8:56 ` Gavin Smith
2023-04-07 13:14 ` Arsen Arsenović
2023-04-06 1:31 ` Playground pager lsp(1) Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-06 6:01 ` Dirk Gouders
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