$Id: INSTALL,v 1.13 2015/11/07 14:01:16 schwarze Exp $ About mdocml, the portable mandoc distribution ---------------------------------------------- The mandoc manpage compiler toolset is a suite of tools compiling mdoc(7), the roff(7) macro language of choice for BSD manual pages, and man(7), the predominant historical language for UNIX manuals. It includes a man(1) manual viewer and additional tools. For general information, see . In case you have questions or want to provide feedback, read . Consider subscribing to the discuss@ mailing list mentioned on that page. If you intend to help with the development of mandoc, consider subscribing to the tech@ mailing list, too. Enjoy using the mandoc toolset! Ingo Schwarze, Karlsruhe, March 2015 Installation ------------ Before manually installing mandoc on your system, please check whether the newest version of mandoc is already installed by default or available via a binary package or a ports system. A list of the latest bundled and ported versions of mandoc for various operating systems is maintained at . Regarding how packages and ports are maintained for your operating system, please consult your operating system documentation. To install mandoc manually, the following steps are needed: 1. If you want to build the CGI program, man.cgi(8), too, run the command "echo BUILD_CGI=1 > configure.local". Then run "cp cgi.h.examples cgi.h" and edit cgi.h as desired. 2. Run "./configure". This script attempts autoconfiguration of mandoc for your system. Read both its standard output and the file "Makefile.local" it generates. If anything looks wrong or different from what you wish, read the file "configure.local.example", create and edit a file "configure.local", and re-run "./configure" until the result seems right to you. On Solaris 10 and earlier, you may have to run "ksh ./configure" because the native /bin/sh lacks some POSIX features. 3. Run "make". Any POSIX-compatible make, in particular both BSD make and GNU make, should work. If the build fails, look at "configure.local.example" and go back to step 2. 4. Run "make -n install" and check whether everything will be installed to the intended places. Otherwise, put some *DIR or *NM* variables into "configure.local" and go back to step 2. 5. Run "sudo make install". If you intend to build a binary package using some kind of fake root mechanism, you may need a command like "make DESTDIR=... install". Read the *-install targets in the "Makefile" to understand how DESTDIR is used. 6. If you want to use the integrated man(1) and your system uses manpath(1), make sure it is configured correctly, in particular, it returns all directory trees where manual pages are installed. Otherwise, if your system uses man.conf(5), make sure it contains a "_whatdb" line for each directory tree, and the order of these lines meets your wishes. 7. If you compiled with database support, run the command "sudo makewhatis" to build mandoc.db(5) databases in all the directory trees configured in step 6. Whenever installing new manual pages, re-run makewhatis(8) to update the databases, or apropos(1) will not find the new pages. 8. To set up a man.cgi(8) server, read its manual page. Note that some man(7) pages may contain low-level roff(7) markup that mandoc does not yet understand. On some BSD systems using mandoc, third-party software is vetted on whether it may be formatted with mandoc. If not, groff(1) is pulled in as a dependency and used to install a pre-formatted "catpage" instead of directly as manual page source. Understanding mandoc dependencies --------------------------------- The mandoc(1), man(1), and demandoc(1) utilities only depend on the zlib library for decompressing gzipped manual pages, but makewhatis(8) and apropos(1) depend on the following additional software: 1. The SQLite database system, see . The recommended version of SQLite is 3.8.4.3 or newer. The mandoc toolset is known to work with version 3.7.5 or newer. Versions older than 3.8.3 may not achieve full performance due to the missing SQLITE_DETERMINISTIC optimization flag. Versions older than 3.8.0 may not show full error information if opening a database fails due to the missing sqlite3_errstr() API. Both are very minor problems, apropos(1) is fully usable with SQLite 3.7.5. Versions older than 3.7.5 may or may not work, they have not been tested. 2. The fts(3) directory traversion functions. If your system does not have them, the bundled compatibility version will be used, so you need not worry in that case. But be careful: the glibc version of fts(3) is known to be broken on 32bit platforms, see . If you run into that problem, set "HAVE_FTS=0" in configure.local. 3. Marc Espie's ohash(3) library. If your system does not have it, the bundled compatibility version will be used, so you probably need not worry about it. One of the chief design goals of the mandoc toolbox is to make sure that nothing related to documentation requires C++. Consequently, linking mandoc against any kind of C++ program would defeat the purpose and is not supported. Checking autoconfiguration quality ---------------------------------- If you want to check whether automatic configuration works well on your platform, consider the following: The mandoc package intentionally does not use GNU autoconf because we consider that toolset a blatant example of overengineering that is obsolete nowadays, since all modern operating systems are now reasonably close to POSIX and do not need arcane shell magic any longer. If your system does need such magic, consider upgrading to reasonably modern POSIX-compliant tools rather than asking for autoconf-style workarounds. As far as mandoc is using any features not mandated by ANSI X3.159-1989 ("ANSI C") or IEEE Std 1003.1-2008 ("POSIX") that some modern systems do not have, we intend to provide autoconfiguration tests and compat_*.c implementations. Please report any that turn out to be missing. Note that while we do strive to produce portable code, we do not slavishly restrict ourselves to POSIX-only interfaces. For improved security and readability, we do use well-designed, modern interfaces like reallocarray(3) even if they are still rather uncommon, of course bundling compat_*.c implementations as needed. Where mandoc is using ANSI C or POSIX features that some systems still lack and that compat_*.c implementations can be provided for without too much hassle, we will consider adding them, too, so please report whatever is missing on your platform. The following steps can be used to manually check the automatic configuration on your platform: 1. Run "make distclean". 2. Run "./configure" 3. Read the file "config.log". It shows the compiler commands used to test the libraries installed on your system and the standard output and standard error output these commands produce. Watch out for unexpected failures. Those are most likely to happen if headers or libraries are installed in unusual places or interfaces defined in unusual headers. You can also look at the file "config.h" and check that no "#define HAVE_*" differ from your expectations.