Re: [groff] improve a few terminal renderings of special characters

[John Gardner]

Ah I see, thanks. I might end up whitelisting sane systems (*BSD) and
stupidly predictable ones (macOS), falling back to a JS-based
implementation for all other cases. I won't try adding all the bells and
whistles that BSD man(1) offers: literally all I need is a *reliable* way
to locate *complete* system documentation. Preferably in one fell-swoop;
emitting a list of every indexed path saves overhead later on thanks
to memoization.

> That is very strange.  Given that Solaris is derived from Sys V Unix
> (which had it) and from CSRG BSD (which also had it), i have no idea
> how they managed to break such a simple option.

It gets better (or worse). Here's what Solaris 11.3's `man -k grep` emits:

$ ~: man -k grep

1. grep(1) /usr/share/man/man1/grep.1
grep - search a file for a pattern

2. pcregrep(1) /usr/share/man/man1/pcregrep.1
pcregrep - a grep with Perl-compatible regular expressions.

3. gegrep(1) /usr/share/man/man1/gegrep.1
grep, egrep, fgrep - print lines matching a pattern

4. gfgrep(1) /usr/share/man/man1/gfgrep.1
grep, egrep, fgrep - print lines matching a pattern

5. ggrep(1) /usr/share/man/man1/ggrep.1
grep, egrep, fgrep - print lines matching a pattern


... which is probably the closest I've come to finding an equivalent to
`man -k` on Solaris..

I blame Oracle. Always blame Oracle.

On Sat, 1 Sep 2018 at 21:41, Ingo Schwarze <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> this likely isn't quite as bad as you seem to fear.
>
> John Gardner wrote on Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 11:01:29PM +1000:
>
> > I should ask, what's the most reliable way of running `man -a -w`?
> > I thought this was universal to `man` implementations,
>
> It is, see
>
>   http://mandoc.bsd.lv/man/man.options.1.html#w
>
> It has been available since AT&T Unix v7, consequently in BSD since
> 3BSD, in Eaton man, man-1.6, man-db, ... - so for practical purposes,
> everywhere.
>
> > but Solaris told me otherwise.
>
> That is very strange.  Given that Solaris is derived from Sys V Unix
> (which had it) and from CSRG BSD (which also had it), i have no idea
> how they managed to break such a simple option.
>
> > illumos uses `man -w` to update the `makewhatis` database,
>
> What a terrible idea.  Illumos is derived from Solaris.  So probably,
> they mistakenly considered the option free because Solaris already
> broke it earlier, and reused it for a different purpose, failing
> to do the required research first.  They should probably fix that
> mistake.
>
> > and this is part of what killed my first attempt at finishing Roff.js.
>
> I suspect you will get away with using -w if you merely implement
> a workaround for Solaris and Solaris-derived systems like Illumos:
> if man -w fails, use man -l with a bit of postprocessing instead.
>
> Of course, do not use -l otherwise:  It is wildly non-portable,
> and for this purpose, purely a Solaris idiosyncracy:
>
>   http://mandoc.bsd.lv/man/man.options.1.html#l
>
> Yours,
>   Ingo
>