man pages

[Panu Matilainen]

On Fri, 2 Jun 2006, Vincent Danen wrote:

> * Panu Matilainen <pmatilai at laiskiainen.org> [2006-06-01 23:39:16 -0700]:
>
>>>>> 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 :)
>
> Well, the suggestion of asciidoc and other systems was on the assumption
> that others would want the docs in other formats, but I don't really see
> that as being important.  I mean, realistically speaking, if I need to
> look at info on apt-get, I'll "man apt-get", not go to the website to
> look at a manpage.
>
> Frankly, I would be happier just making the docs in man format... it's
> much easier.

I think that summarizes the situation pretty well, and I don't think 
writing man pages as man pages is a decision one would get fired for :)

So be it then. I wont miss the sgml docbook stuff, that's for sure.

BTW Vincent, if you start updating/polishing the man pages (which is very 
much welcome), do use the man page versions from svn trunk as starting 
point as I've already done a fair amount of debianism-cleaning on them 
compared to any released versions.

 	- Panu -