On Sun, Nov 03, 2024 at 02:59:34AM +0100, Alejandro Colomar wrote: > On Sun, Nov 03, 2024 at 12:47:23AM +0000, Colin Watson wrote: > > I'm not trying to stop you committing whatever you want to your > > repository, of course, but I want to be clear that this doesn't actually > > solve the right problem for manual page indexing. The point of the > > parsing code in mandb(8) - and I'm not claiming that it's great code or > > the perfect design, just that it works most of the time - is to extract > > the names and summary-descriptions from each page so that they can be > > used by tools such as apropos(1) and whatis(1). Splitting on section > > boundaries is just the simplest part of that problem, and I don't think > > that doing it in a separate program really gains anything. > > Splitting on section boundaries is the minimum thing so that mandb(8) > can use groff(1) directly to parse the section (instead of rolling your > own man(7) parser). No, it doesn't help, because mandb(8) still has to do a bunch of other man(7) parsing on top of that (including the problem that caused me to be CCed into this thread in the first place). Delegating just the section splitting to a separate tool would add quite a bit of complexity without removing the need for man-db's own parser. A separate tool is only useful if it solves the whole problem at hand, rather than maybe 10% of it. And even then it would need some careful thought around integration. Thanks, -- Colin Watson (he/him) [cjwatson@xxxxxxxxxx]
