When I have time I'll do a search for man pages that actually *need*
-ms, as I'm getting the impression that it's never used for man pages
and all of grog's guesses for it are wrong.
Unfortunately, this can lead to slightly confusing scenarios, because
the exact package of the displayed man page is not very well defined.
It's possible that, when browsing from a package listing to a man page,
you may see an included file that does not come from the package you
browsed from.
E.g. https://manned.org/pwrite/5f2909f6 - that man page simply includes
pread.2, but from the URL it's unclear from which package or system it
should be included.
The only way to fix this is to add the package ID to the link format.
The previous C code was troublesome.
- Didn't handle long lines
- I couldn't convince myself that it was free of memory safety issues
- Needed improving anyway, there are some formatting bugs. These are
hard to fix in the current code.
I mostly replicated the formatting bugs of the old C implementation in
Rust, and possibly added a few new bugs as well. It's not a significant
improvement right now, more testing and fixing will be needed.
The performance of both implementations is comparable, with the Rust
version being slightly faster in many cases (and slower in some others).
I did spend more time trying to optimize this Rust version than I did
with the old C code. I initially tried a naive-ish conversion of the C
code to Rust, but that turned out to be much slower and I had to resort
to using regexes and different data structures fix that.
