On Mon, Jan 17, 2022 at 09:15:14PM +0100, Steinar H. Gunderson wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 17, 2022 at 04:10:02AM +0000, Colin Watson wrote:
> > We definitely do need to sort out encoding conversion, though. Although
> > UTF-8 has been recommended for many years, policy still allows "the
> > usual legacy encoding" and we've never got round to mandating UTF-8:
> >
> > $ w3m -dump https://lintian.debian.org/tags/national-encoding | grep
> > --count usr/share/man
> > 502
>
> I tried looking at this, but TBH I don't think the man-db path _ever_
> inserts a conversion. The parameter to the lexer path is simply always NULL
> in all calls, except for from a test. Am I missing something?
test_manfile (which despite the name is not a test function) calls
find_name with file!="-" and encoding=NULL; that causes find_name to
call get_page_encoding, which always returns something non-NULL
("ISO-8859-1" for English pages), and then call add_manconv from that to
UTF-8.
> > Would you care to have a look at this?
> >
> > https://gitlab.com/cjwatson/man-db/-/merge_requests/2
>
> Thanks! I'll have a go at a review, but it might need to wait until the end
> of the week. I'll try to get it done earlier, though. How would you like any
> review comments? Email or somehow in Gitlab?
Mild preference for GitLab MR comments, but I'm not that fussy.
> > There's probably still room for improvement, but unlikely to be much
> > more than a factor of two or so at this point, and I think this should
> > get us comfortably back to the point where it's no longer annoying
> > people during upgrades.
>
> Someone else suggested an idea I thought of throwing around: In addition
> to optimizing the code, perhaps the postinst trigger should simply launch the
> man-db timer in the background? At least for systemd users, this should be
> pretty straightforward, and give the control back to the installation
> process. (Given that dpkg is very much single-threaded, we're not generally
> throughput-bound, so using up a core shouldn't be a big problem.)
I suppose that's an option; apt-xapian-index.postinst seems to be
precedent for doing things in the background, albeit in a non-systemd
way. Unlike the postinst, man-db.service omits -p/--no-purge, but maybe
that would be OK, especially after this round of optimization. I'll
consider that once I get to packaging these changes.
--
Colin Watson (he/him) [cjwat...@debian.org]
