Hi Klemens, Klemens Nanni wrote on Sat, Sep 19, 2020 at 10:45:19PM +0200: > On Sat, Sep 19, 2020 at 08:08:43PM +0200, Stefan Hagen wrote:
>> misc/tkman depends on textproc/glimpse. Judging from patch-Makefile, it ought to be trivial to remove the dependency on glimpse. >> This one would have to go too. >> I haven't found any other dependency. > Thanks for digging, tkman looks like a port we could zap: I can start > it with `MANPATH=/usr/share/man tkman' and the window appears for a few > seconds but then closes again without any error message or non-zero exit > code. I fail to reproduce the crash you report, but the window does contain lots of error messages when i start tkman(1): || Problems in component paths of MANPATH environment variable... || /usr/share/man -- no `whatis' file for apropos || => generate `whatis' with mkwhatis/makewhatis/catman The above basically means tkman is incompatible with OpenBSD at least in some respects, though patching that might be possible and perhaps even easy. It obviously requires an old-style "whatis" database which we deleted years ago. It doesn't respect our man.conf(5) either, instead hardcoding the manpath in patch-Makefile. Requiring MANPATH to be set is quite bad. People should *not* set MANPATH because that will sooner or later cause some manual pages to not be found. The MANPATH feature is only intended for rare and exotic tasks like reading non-English manual pages, like temporarily using non-standard trees (e.g. from the man-pages-posix port), or for debugging individual trees. || Stray cats (formatted pages in .../man/catN without corresponding || source in .../man/manN) || /usr/local/man/cat1 || mwm uil xmbind xwit That means it doesn't understand the concept of preformatted-only pages either (which is used for pages where the source code is of insufficient quality for installation, or unavailable in the first place). All that said, significant numbers of features (of which there are really many) work as advertised at least part-way, even some that i would have thought likely to fail outright. So even though i don't know how good the overall code quality really is, it does seem to be surprisingly robust. > Does anyone have a use for such an outdated manual browser/reader GUI > which does not work by default and requires another ancient port? There are some feature that may be interesting to some users, like * hypertext links * texinfo support * expandable/collapsable sections in manual pages * some fancy syntax highlighting (personally, i hate syntax highlighting, but i know many like it) * and several others At the very least, the port implements several interesting ideas that could inspire future development of manual page browsing tools, so it would seem a bit sad from where i stand to kill it. > OK to remove misc/tkman? I wouldn't very strongly object to deletion if porters think that the port makes their life harder or impedes progress, but given that it looks like the dependency on glimpse can easily be removed, i don't see which kind of trouble the port could cause. It could certainly benefit from an active maintainer who investigated and fixed issues. My impression is significant numbers of minor issues exist, but nothing that strikes me as making the port completely useless. Also, the patch-Makefile contains some very outdated decisions. For example, it explicitly uses groff for formatting rather than mandoc. Some work should be done on this one. I have to admit that personally, i care more about console support than about GUIs, but if somebody wants to improve GUI support for manual page display on OpenBSD, this port seems like child likely to reward some love shown to it. Also, i'm not aware of a better GUI to display manual pages. Yours, Ingo
