Re: Documentation

[Karl EICHWALDER <ke gnu franken de>]

Nils Barth <nbarth@fas.harvard.edu> writes:

|   Agreed.

Disagreed.  GNOME is about graphics and GUI -- AFAIK, `man' isn't
able to deal with pictures.  Go figure ;-)

|   Fortunately, man pages are (theoretically) easy to make for GNOME,
|   since we document in DocBook. Thus, all you need to do is feed your
|   documentation through a DocBook -> Man (or TeXinfo, or whatever)
|   convert and ta-da! Man pages!

In practice, you've to prepare the SGML/XML source files to produce
manpages; have a look at Norman Walsh's book (p. 44 s.) -- if you don't
want to buy it, it's available at ww.docbook.org and/or www.nwalsh.com
(sorry. I'm not online to check it).

|   However, I haven't had any luck with docbook2X or DocBook-to-man
|   (though I haven't tried very hard) -- I'm guessing that this hurdle is
|   why there aren't more GNOME man pages.

I didn't try these tools.  For quick results I'd try

    help2man gnome-session

etc.

|   That said, I agree that we should have man pages and TeXinfo if
|   possible.

Wrong spelling: It's spelled "Texinfo".

BTW, I don't need manpage to look up the command how to start an
application that will be able to play CDs.  I use the panel and the menu
system...  Derek, did you read the GNOME User Guide?

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