[gentoo-user] Bringing mdocml to Gentoo, MANPATH woes

[Wolfgang Mueller]

Hello, list.

For the past few days I have been working on bringing mdocml to Gentoo
as a full alternative to man-db. In the course of writing the ebuild,
I have come across some issues on which I would like to have some
comments:

1. When submitting the ebuild through bugzilla, is it enough to note
that virtual/man would need changes to reflect that mdocml satisfies
it, or does that warrant a new bug (with depedency on the ebuild)?

2. I have asked about the next questions on freenode's #gentoo-dev-help
channel already, but got no answer: What is the reasoning to suppress
the MANPATH environment variable in ebuilds? Updating/creating the
mandoc database in pkg_postinst will only pick up /usr/share/man, and
fully ignore the gcc and binutils manpages that are correctly set in
MANPATH. This also happens to man-db, which means that the manpages
gcc and binutils bring will *never* show up in apropos or man -k. I'd
be glad to open a bug about this, but wanted first to know if this is
actually a feature.

Note that MANPATH is also not set in the cron.daily script that man-db
brings. You can easily verify this bug like so:

$ man fsf-funding # this will correctly display the fsf-funding manpage
$ apropos fsf # this will find fsfreeze/etc, but *not* fsf-funding

On my testing system that has mdocml set up (and the correct paths fed
into makewhatis), apropos indeed finds fsf-funding. I have not tested
this with man-db yet, but I would assume that sourcing the environment
or somehow setting MANPATH in the ebuild and the cron script would fix
this and add the corresponding manpages to the man-db database.

And with this, we come to...

3. What would be the best way to set the MANPATH in the ebuild and the
cron script? It seems to me that sourcing /etc/profile in the ebuild's
pkg_postinst is a terrible hack, and in my current ebuild (see end of
this mail) I resolved to just let it run on /usr/share/man and to then
alert the user. My cron.daily script indeed sources /etc/profile before
running makewhatis.

I post this on the -user list because it seems to me that I have issues
relating to several distinct components. If this is better discussed
somewhere else, I would appreciate some pointers :)

You can find the ebuild (and corresponding files) here:
https://github.com/vehk/pramantha/tree/mdocml-wip/sys-apps/mdocml

-- 
Wolfgang Mueller / vehk.de / GPG 0xc543cfce9465f573