man pages

[Gary L. Greene Jr.]

On Friday 02 June 2006 02:39 am, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> On Fri, 2 Jun 2006, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> > On Thu, 2006-06-01 at 21:24 +0300, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> >> On Thu, 2006-06-01 at 19:01 +0300, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> >>> For me personally plain old ascii with a bit of formatting is by far
> >>> the preferred way to write documentation,
> >
> > Frankly speaking, I don't see any need for anything beyond plain old
> > man-pages. People wanting to use html-manpages, always can resort to
> > man2html, but I never understood why people would want html-formated
> > man-pages ;)
>
> Heh, me neither really :)
>
> > Real docs/manuals are a different issue.
> >
> >>> asciidoc just has the added bonus
> >>> it can be converted to pretty much anything through converting it to
> >>> docbook.
> >
> > Hmm, I am not familiar with asciidoc. To me, it's an exotic tool, with
> > an unknown footprint, I'd rather not rely upon.
>
> It's a new thing for me as well and I'm not quite convinced. It's nice
> (for me) in many ways but...
>
> >>> So it kinda looks like best of both worlds to me: an extremely
> >>> easy format to write docs in and yet can be converted to man pages,
> >>> html, xml, docbook whatever.
> >
> > docbook would be fine with me, esp. as it seems to be what Debian seems
> > to be using, which would help keeping diffs to upstream low.
>
> I don't really consider Debian as upstream anymore :) Perhaps more like a
> sidestream. Their docs are full of debianisms to the point it's just
> annoying to apt-rpm users, unless the docs started to be conditionally
> built in #ifdef HAVE_RPM/#endif style and we started sending our doc
> updates back to them. Does docbook even support "conditional compilation"?

It does, I just can't remember the syntax for that atm :(

> > The question I can't answer is: Which tool to use to convert docbook
> > into "pre-built docs"?
>
> I don't at the moment have any strong preference either, I can live with
> any of the available choices. So, lets not rush any decision here, I'd
> like to hear more people's comments on this (good/bad experiences with
> the various tools etc).
>
>  	- Panu -
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