[screen-devel] Screen documentation

[Micah Cowan]

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Adam Lazur wrote:
> Micah Cowan (address@hidden) said:
>> I also think it's worth starting discussions on consolidating the man
>> page and the texinfo manual, which are separately-maintained manuals on
>> GNU Screen, which translates to duplication of effort and opportunities
>> for conflicting documentation.
> 
> I agree, 2 sets of documentation sucks.
> 
> I remember looking at this a coupla years back for the debian package.
> There weren't any good solutions then (read: I was too lazy to write
> one, and nobody else had what I wanted). There are a few projects that
> maintain one or the other, and autogen the counterpart. I remember the
> generated one always getting the short end of the stick quality wise.
> 
> The crusty old unix guy inside my head is screaming "DROP THE TEXINFO,
> IT'S EVIL", but the gnu project probably disagrees ;)

Emphatically. :) GNU policy is to always provide texinfo, and only
provide man pages if you want to/must.

For my part, I'm not a huge fan of either man or texinfo, but I do
prefer TeX over *roff (for typeset pages, that is). And I mostly like
info's interactive interface over man's one-big-set-of-pages.

A large number of other GNU projects generate a simple man page from the
program's --help output, and direct the reader to the info manual. We
could go that route.

Wget generates the manpage from some (but not all) of the texinfo
manual, using "texi2pod.pl", which we apparently got from coreutils.
It's not perfect, but it mostly does the job. We could see if that's
appropriate for our needs. It'd probably take some work to adjust
Screen's texinfo manual for the purpose, though.

- --
Micah J. Cowan
Programmer, musician, typesetting enthusiast, gamer,
and GNU Wget Project Maintainer.
http://micah.cowan.name/
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