Re: man pages for our apps?

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Tue, May 29, 2001 at 08:53:43AM -0600 or thereabouts, John Fleck wrote:
> On Mon, May 28, 2001 at 07:45:13AM +1000, Phillip Shelton wrote:
> > It should be doable. It will mean you will need to write some new
> > stylesheets that output troff from DocBook.  Isn't that what the style
> > sheets are for?
> > >
> > > If there were some way to autogenerate at least a simple man page from
> > > the docbook markup that we have (similar to the way that "info
> > > --usage" autogenerates manpage-like output from texinfo markup), it
> > > would be well worth providing.
> 
> I think it's less a question of "can we do it technically" or "would
> it benefit users" and more a question of "do we have the time". As a
> group, we've got a long todo list.
> 
> That said, if someone wants to jump in and volunteer...

Yeah, I'm all for man pages. However, man pages are typically very,
_very_ different from the stuff we've been doing for the help-browser.
Terse, to say the least. I would think that the people who are likely
to look at them are either people who don't know about the ghelp
stuff, or sysadmin types/hacker types looking for the most succinct
description possible. (Guesswork, that, though.)

I'd love to be able to write man pages, but I think finishing the
bulk of the help stuff first is a good idea. Then again, if people
just contribute them, I'm all for it :) 

Telsa