Re: [MACTCL] Re: tclLoadDyld.c (was: Itcl on MacOSX)

[James B. <jk...@mr...>]

On Tue, Feb 26, 2002 at 10:29:55PM +1100, Daniel A. Steffen wrote:
> you need to run /usr/libexec/makewhatis as root
> 
> the /etc/weekly cron job does it for you if your machine is on at Sat 
> 4:30 am (c.f. /etc/crontab)

Our Mac is used much like a real Unix machine. It's always up and so the cron
jobs are run. The problem is not that makewhatis hasn't been run, but simply
that the format of the manual pages has not been thought out correctly. Either 
the NAME component needs to list all the function names contained within it so 
that makewhatis can add them to its database, or a dummy manual page needs to
be created. Eg:

% cat NSAddModule.3
.so man3/NSModules.3

(That's just a guess - I haven't checked in which man section it really is.)
This is the standard way of doing things on Digital Unix and several other
Unix systems, and it means that man works much more intuitively.

> I find that a google search for e.g. "NSAddImage" is often faster & 
> more productive than grep -r through my filesystem...

I do wonder how come apple don't run an internal-only web server on the system 
with a precomputed index of all the documentation using one of the standard,
and free, web search engines. That way searching in the online help would
actually work.

Anyway, thanks for the google idea. It does indeed come up with the goods (as
always it seems!).

James

-- 
James Bonfield (jk...@mr...)   Fax: (+44) 01223 213556
Medical Research Council - Laboratory of Molecular Biology,
Hills Road, Cambridge, CB2 2QH, England.
Also see Staden Package WWW site at http://www.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/pubseq/