"James K. Lowden" <jklow...@schemamania.org> wrote: |On Fri, 29 Apr 2016 17:50:52 +0200 |Ingo Schwarze <schwa...@usta.de> wrote:
|Have you experimented with a single index for all man pages? I wonder |how useful that would be, or how it might be subdivided. An index that |spanned pages would be helpful for sets of routines covered by |different man pages. (groff.7 and groff_char.7 come to mind.) In books as well as in info pages there are either multiple indexes or a single index where entries are somehow tagged to indicate an entries' type, if that is applicable, which it definetely is for the Unix manual system with its different sections, and the corresponding differences in the manuals contained therein. And especially mdoc(7) can be easily extended to provide the necessary tagging facilities, and then it is only the tool that is missing to generate such a global index from the per-document indexes. If that basic Unix system will gain more functionality it could be hoped that all those other formats in which people started writing their manuals in order to gain that bit more (and they don't mind adding complicated and cryptic tags in order to do so) will extend their converters to also use it. And at least automatically created mdoc(7) should be acceptable to anybody. It's absurd that (at least) in the Linux world people started tagging man(7) manual pages, things which you use every day, with function-less blue hyperlinks using font escapes, whereas billions of dollars and maybe hundreds of thousands of man hours have been put into code that is being rudely documented. Unfortunately i am still stuck in the MUA i maintain, and i will need until at least mid summer eve. But then i will come to my roff fork, and at the long run it will be mdoc all through and it will ship with the mdocmx extension from the start. Even «magic» won't help against the basic problem of non-extended mdoc(7), and that is that you don't have anchors: no real index without proper anchors. --steffen
