Hi Ingo, Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@xxxxxxx> writes: > Dirk Gouders wrote on Sat, Apr 08, 2023 at 10:59:32PM +0200: >> Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@xxxxxxx> 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
