xref: /freebsd/contrib/mandoc/INSTALL (revision 6d38604f)

$Id: INSTALL,v 1.24 2021/09/20 13:25:42 schwarze Exp $

About the portable mandoc distribution
--------------------------------------
The mandoc manpage compiler toolset (formerly called "mdocml")
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 <http://mandoc.bsd.lv/>.

In case you have questions or want to provide feedback, read
<http://mandoc.bsd.lv/contact.html>.  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, September 2021


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 <http://mandoc.bsd.lv/ports.html>.

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.example cgi.h" and edit cgi.h as desired.

2. If you also want to build the catman(8) utility, run the
command "echo BUILD_CATMAN=1 >> configure.local".  Note that it
is unlikely to be a drop-in replacement providing the same
functionality as your system's "catman", if your operating
system contains one.

3. Define MANPATH_DEFAULT in configure.local
if /usr/share/man:/usr/X11R6/man:/usr/local/man is not appropriate
for your operating system.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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 4.

7. Optionally run the regression suite.
Basically, that amounts to "make regress" to do a standard regression
run, running all tests.  For more fine-grained control,
read "./mandoc -l regress/regress.pl.1",
then run "cd regress && ./regress.pl" with optional arguments.
The regression suite requires a reasonably modern Perl interpreter.
Examples of systems that are too old to run the regression suite
include Solaris 9, Solaris 10, and Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.
On Solaris 11, the suite does run, but some tests fail;
look at the BUGS section of that manual page.

8. 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.

9. Run the command "sudo makewhatis" to build mandoc.db(5) databases
in all the directory trees configured in step 3.  Whenever installing
new manual pages, re-run makewhatis(8) to update the databases, or
apropos(1) will not find the new pages.

10. To set up a man.cgi(8) server, read its manual page.

Note that a very small number of man(7) pages 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 pre-formatted "catpages" instead of
manual page sources.  This mechanism is used much less frequently
than in the past.  On OpenBSD, only 25 out of about 10000 ports
still require formatting with groff(1).


Understanding mandoc dependencies
---------------------------------
The following libraries are required:

1. zlib for decompressing gzipped manual pages.

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: old
glibc versions of fts(3) were known to be broken on 32bit platforms,
see <https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=11460>.
That was presumably fixed in glibc-2.23.
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.