A mess with man pages

[Zucca]

On most of my systems I get this error messages when trying to view a man page:

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man: outdated mandoc.db lacks emerge(1) entry, run makewhatis /usr/share/man

... ewww. Isn't a filesystem already good enough of a database for man pages? (Running the command does not change anything.)

Anyway. less does try to show the man page despite this error, but all I see is binary data. I quickly noticed that the binary data shown was compressed roff markup (aka man page syntax?). So in addition to some man database shenanigans I also have broken decompressor of man pages.

Questions:

• Can I get rid of any databases related to man pages?
• How do I fix this compression issue?
  • I'd prefer zstd or lzip compression, but there's no point compressing files that have size less than the filesystem block size.

... also anyone else having these problems?

[Anon-E-moose]

Do you have mandoc installed? if so, why? man runs perfectly fine without it.

Edit to add: switch to man-db

From the man virtual

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RDEPEND="
    || (
        sys-apps/man-db
        >=app-text/mandoc-1.14.5-r1[system-man]
    )
"

So either/or, I've never used mandoc

[Banana]

man: outdated mandoc.db lacks emerge(1) entry, run makewhatis /usr/share/man

I do not get this error message.

Any specific man page viewed?

[Zucca]

Do you have mandoc installed? if so, why? man runs perfectly fine without it.

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M710q ~ # equery d  mandoc
 * These packages depend on mandoc:
sys-libs/efivar-39-r1 (app-text/mandoc)
virtual/man-0-r4 (>=app-text/mandoc-1.14.5-r1[system-man])

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M710q ~ # equery u mandoc
[ Legend : U - final flag setting for installation]
[        : I - package is installed with flag     ]
[ Colors : set, unset                             ]
 * Found these USE flags for app-text/mandoc-1.14.6:
 U I
 - - cgi        : build man.cgi web plugin for viewing man pages
 + + system-man : set as the default man provider
 - - test       : Enable dependencies and/or preparations necessary to run tests (usually controlled by FEATURES=test
                  but can be toggled independently)

Ok. Apparently I've misconfigured my systems by setting system-man globally, as I thought it would make sure programs wouldn't bring their own man... Like the opposite of bundled-* -flags.
I'll sort this out first.

Any specific man page viewed?

Any. None specific.

[Zucca]

Edit to add: switch to man-db

From the man virtual

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RDEPEND="
    || (
        sys-apps/man-db
        >=app-text/mandoc-1.14.5-r1[system-man]
    )
"

So either/or, I've never used mandoc

I was just digging into that too.
But:

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NBLK-WAX9X ~ # qsearch man-db
sys-apps/man-db: A man replacement that utilizes dbm instead of flat files

:'(

I guess I'll take the database then, but can't I just have compressed man files? :(
I mean, it can't be very complex to

• locate the right man page from filesystem
• uncompress it
• pipe it to roff formatter
• pipe to a pager

I mean this cannot be a place where a database brings any significant advantages? Right? Am I missing something?

[Anon-E-moose]

I don't use a db, despite the name, all man pages are bz2 compressed files

I think man-db will allow you to use a database, but doesn't require it, and man <>, always uses less for viewing, although settable.

Edit to add: I guess it does do a database, but it's transparent to me (end user)

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$ file /var/cache/man/index.db 
/var/cache/man/index.db: GNU dbm 1.x or ndbm database, little endian, 64-bit

These are the flags I use, although I suppose only one db type is needed

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 * Found these USE flags for sys-apps/man-db-2.9.4-r1:
 U I
 + + berkdb      : Add support for sys-libs/db (Berkeley DB for MySQL)
 + + gdbm        : Add support for sys-libs/gdbm (GNU database libraries)
 + + manpager    : Enable manpager wrapper for colorizing output 
 - - nls         : Add Native Language Support (using gettext - GNU locale utilities)
 + + seccomp     : Enable seccomp (secure computing mode) to perform system call filtering at runtime to increase
                   security of programs
 - - static-libs : Build static versions of dynamic libraries as well
 + + zlib        : Add support for zlib compression

The logic of the ebuild selects either gdbm or db and if neither flag is set forces gdbm (which is a real light weight db)

[skellr]

all man pages are bz2 compressed files

Yeah they/documentation are compressed with bz2 by default.

I remember "back in the day" a slight lag decompressing a bz2 man page on a pentium4 and was triggered by it. I mean, how big is a man page anyway? I'm thankfull I started on this journey with i686...

PORTAGE_COMPRESS="" in make.conf will disable compression. There are other compression options in make.conf.5

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PORTAGE_COMPRESS = "bzip2"
    This variable contains the command used to compress documentation during the install phase. 
PORTAGE_COMPRESS_EXCLUDE_SUFFIXES = "gif htm[l]? jp[e]?g pdf png"
    This variable contains a space delimited list of file suffixes for which matching files are excluded when the PORTAGE_COMPRESS command is called. Regular expressions are supported and the match is performed only against the portion of the file name which follows the last period character. 
PORTAGE_COMPRESS_FLAGS = "-9"
    This variable contains flags for the PORTAGE_COMPRESS command. 

And then, everything in /usr/share/doc is also compressed. Try browsing a local HTML doc in a web browser when it's compressed...