WoMan: a few suggestions

[Klaus Zeitler]

emacs is like real life, you discover a WoMan and problems arise :-).

On my workstation WoMan takes about 2 and a half minutes to
build its internal data structure (long MANPATH I know).
Currently WoMan decides when to rebuild the cache, e.g. MANPATH changes.
Unfortunately, since we're working here under ClearCase, the MANPATH
changes quite often, though this hardly ever matters for most of the man pages.
I'd like to have a possibility to regenerate the cache only on demand.
(My current solution is a new variable woman-dont-update-cache-automatically
and I've advised woman-read-directory-cache)

I'd like to have the code in woman-file-name that generates the data structures
split in a separate "interactive" function.
Now I recreate the cache once a day via a cron job.

I wonder if the completion mechanism makes much sense. Almost always I get
just a "/" in the minibuffer and have to select from the completion buffer
(that's because we have many man pages under /usr and /opt). My guess is
that more than 90% of the time a user just wants the first man page that
is found in the search path (same behavior as if one calls man directly).
Therefore maybe it'd be better if WoMan would show the minibuffer e.g. for
the ls command like: "Manual file (/usr/man/sman1/ls.1): ".
Now the user can just press enter to select this man page and in case he
wants to see other man directories for this command he can press "?".

Klaus

-- 
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|  Klaus Zeitler      Lucent Technologies  |
|  Email:             address@hidden  |
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---
Imagination is the one weapon in the war
against reality.    -- Jules de Gaultier