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bug#16722: 24.3.50; `M-x man' does not handle case appropriately
From: |
Eli Zaretskii |
Subject: |
bug#16722: 24.3.50; `M-x man' does not handle case appropriately |
Date: |
Sun, 16 Feb 2014 05:50:51 +0200 |
> From: Wolfgang Jenkner <wjenkner@inode.at>
> Cc: 16722@debbugs.gnu.org
> Date: Sun, 16 Feb 2014 02:08:32 +0100
>
> On Sat, Feb 15 2014, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>
> >> It seems (http://cygwin.com/packages/) that man-1.* is the man package
> >> provided by default in cygwin, but I suppose cygwin packages could also
> >> be used with a non-cygwin emacs? Would it be reasonable to set the
> >> default for `Man-man-k-use-anchor' to non-nil if the system type is
> >> `cygwin' or `windows-nt' or `ms-dos'?
> >
> > It is much better, IMO, to probe for "man -k" support the first time
> > "M-x man" is invoked, like we do with "M-x grep". Relying on
> > system-type should only be a very distant second candidate (e.g., what
> > if Windows machines will get a proper 'man' command that does supports
> > apropos databases?).
>
> But `man -k' always works (to the extent we need it to) if the whatis
> database is correctly installed.
No, it doesn't. For example, it isn't supported with this clone:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ezwinports/files/man-1.4-bin.zip/download
And, as demonstrated in this bug report, it can backfire when the
database is not "correctly installed".
My suggestion will gracefully handle both cases.
> The problem is just a bug in this particular implementation, viz.,
> `man -k' sends error messages to stdout. Strictly speaking, POSIX
> requires emacs to assume that everything in stdout represents content
> from the whatis database, but this is not desirable in this case.
> Setting `Man-man-k-use-anchor' to non-nil works around this annoyance,
> for the reasons I explained in this bug thread.
If you are saying that users should set an option to avoid this
problem, I might agree (although I don't think this option will help
for the above clone). However, having Emacs detect this automatically
is even better.