Re: Manpage generation

[Zack Weinberg]

On Mon, Apr 08, 2002 at 11:42:49AM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > 
> > So, what my program does is interpret magic comments that select
> > chunks of the Texinfo source to be rendered into POD and thence
> > manpage troff.
> 
> This might prove very difficult with some manuals, where the necessary 
> information is spread across many nodes.  My canonical example is the 
> manual from Tar 1.12.

I only have Tar 1.13.x convenient, but it doesn't seem that bad.  Note
that nothing stops you from having multiple blocks marked for the same
section; all the chunks get concatenated together.  It looks to me
like an adequate manpage could be constructed out of the 'Synopsis',
'Operation Summary', and 'Option Summary' nodes of that manual easily
enough.

> I think the issue is whether generation of man pages from a Texinfo 
> manual is possible without forcing the Texinfo author to invest a 
> significant amount of work (like adding those man-page-only parts, or 
> deciding what parts of the Texinfo manual should go into the man page).  
> Because if the author does have to invest a significant effort, she 
> might just go ahead and maintain a man page ;-)

No one is _forcing_ the author to add this markup and set up their
Makefiles to generate manpages.  It's a handy feature which has made
it practical to keep the GCC manpages up to date, and which I think
might be widely useful.

zw