man pages

[Vincent Danen]

* Dag Wieers <dag at wieers.com> [2006-05-28 14:25:03 +0200]:

> > > > What other formats do you want the manpages in other than txt and html?
> > > > There are man2txt and man2html converters about that would be
> > > > sufficient, no?  Or are you making pdf files with these?
> > > 
> > > Have you ever looked at asciidoc. I'm using asciidoc everywhere now, for 
> > > manpages and normal documentation. asciidoc is just a strict formatting 
> > > for ascii txt files so that they are still human readable as-is, are very 
> > > easy to create (once you know the syntax) and you only need the asciidoc 
> > > tool to convert to html or docbook. From the docbook output you can move 
> > > to man-pages, PDF and others.
> > > 
> > > A simple example is at:
> > > 
> > > 	http://svn.rpmforge.net/svn/trunk/tools/dstat/dstat.1.txt
> > 
> > Hum, that looks very nice indeed. I'm in no way love with the docbook
> > stuff, it's cumbersome to write which raises the bar on updating
> > documentation quite significantly, whereas the above .. Thanks Dag for
> > the pointer, I'll seriously consider switching to that for my own
> > projects :)
> 
> I forgot to mention however, that asciidoc requires python 2.3 or newer, 
> which is not available on older distributions (like EL3). Which to me is 
> the only drawback.

But, as was stated before, this just needs to be there for "make dist",
so it doesn't matter so much.  Besides, I think it's more likely to have
python available in a distro than docbook, sgml stuff, and the right
dtd.

> But then again, like you mentioned, the files only need to be generated 
> when doing 'make dist' so asciidoc is only a requirement for developers, 
> not for packagers or users.

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Empty set (0.00sec)

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