bug#12098: How to trap errors in man?

[Reuben Thomas]

On 1 August 2012 01:15, Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org> wrote:
>
> The Emacs Info reader can format man pages with the help
> of info-man.el.

This doesn't appear to be standard.

>> Personally, I'd just rip out all the asynchronous stuff and make "man"
>> synchronous (I have man set to "bully" mode in my setup), but I am
>> guessing that would be an unpopular change,
>
> Yes, the delay when the whole session is freezing during formatting would
> be undesirable.

There are plenty of things that freeze the session for much longer
than the fraction of a second it takes to format most man pages! Even
bash(1) only takes about a second. What workflow do you have in mind
where a user starts a man page and then does something else for at
most a few seconds? The idea of requesting some documentation and then
doing something else for a few seconds is a bit odd to me…

>  In bug#9084 we are trying to improve this by
> modifying man.el to work more like async shell
> commands.

Are you sure about that bug number? I looked and it seems to be about
window layout.

> You can use `Man-cooked-hook' that is called at the end of
> `Man-bgproc-sentinel'.  In this hook you can check whether the value of
> `Man-page-list' is nil.

I can't see how to use this to communicate back to a particular caller
that man failed; help?

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