system/man-db: Added (database-driven manual pager suite).

Signed-off-by: Willy Sudiarto Raharjo <willysr@slackbuilds.org>

1 files changed, 50 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/system/man-db/README.Slackware b/system/man-db/README.Slackware
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+By default, man-db can be installed alongside Slackware's man package
+without conflict, as it installs its binaries and man pages into
+/opt/man-db. After installation, either log out and back in, or source
+/etc/profile.d/man-db.sh in your shell (this adjusts $PATH so the man
+command from /opt/man-db will be found first).
+
+Alternately, man-db can be built as a replacement for Slackware's
+man package.  To do this, set USR=yes in the script's environment,
+and "removepkg man" before installing man-db. No profile scripts are
+installed in this case.
+
+When installing man-db, the doinst.sh script may take several minutes to
+run. This is because it's indexing all the man pages on the system. Also,
+a cron job is installed in /etc/cron.daily, which adds newly-installed
+man pages to the database. The index speeds up searching via "man -K",
+"man -k", or "apropos". It's fast enough that "man -K" is now actually
+useful... the disadvantage is that newly-installed man pages won't be
+found in these searches until the database has been updated, so any time
+you install new man pages, you'll want to run "mandb" as root, or wait
+for cron to do it for you (if you don't do this, the new pages can still
+be displayed, they just won't be searchable). The indexing runs quickly
+once the initial database has been created, so the cron job or manual
+update shouldn't bring your system to its knees.
+
+The database is located in /var/cache/man, and on a full Slackware install
+will be approximately 5MB in size. During index creation, approximately
+10MB in /var is used. If you decide to removepkg man-db, you'll probably
+also want to get rid of its database with "rm -rf /var/cache/man". If
+the database gets corrupted somehow, it can be regenerated from scratch
+by running "mandb -c" or just reinstalling the man-db package.
+
+Although man-db supports caching formatted pages ("cat" pages), it's
+disabled in this build, to make man-db behave more like Slackware's man
+(which supports caching, but it's disabled). On modern (and even 10+
+year old) systems, the small amount of extra time it takes to format
+a man page every time it's viewed is probably not worth the headaches
+caused by stale cat pages.
+
+Unlike some distro packages of man-db, this build doesn't install man or
+mandb setuid. This prevents caching cat pages from working (see above),
+and prevents man from automatically adding new man pages to the database
+the first time a user views them (they will be indexed by the cron job,
+or by root manually running "mandb", if you're impatient).
+
+A word about i18n support: the whole reason I packaged man-db is because
+Slackware's man can't handle Japanese man pages, and I couldn't come
+up with a way to make them work after several hours of research and
+man.conf editing. With man-db, they Just Work, with LANG=ja_JP.UTF-8
+(now all I have to do is learn to read Japanese). In general, UTF-8
+locales are preferred for man-db, although non-UTF-8 is also supported.