Re: Template for GNOME man pages.

[John Fleck <jfleck inkstain net>]

On Tue, Oct 29, 2002 at 04:28:50PM +0000, Pat Costello wrote:
> 
> > 
> > <quote who="Pat Costello"/>
> > 
> > > When you say "convert it to a man page", what exactly do you mean? Do you
> > > mean that the final output is nroff? If so, why not write the man page in
> > > nroff in the first place? What's the aim of writing in one format (xml) if
> > > we have to convert to another? 
> > 
> > [ I'd offer that the Docbook XML is easier to read and maintain for a docs
> > project that works almost entirely with Docbook XML already. :-) ]
> > 
> > - Jeff
> > 
> 
> Well, there is the complication that engineers will be writing the man pages, 
> and may well be more familiar with nroff than xml. Although I see and appreciate 
> the magnificence of consistency, I'm not really convinced that the converter 
> route is needed. Put it another way, if we create just nroff final man page 
> files, and not original xml source, will anyone be put out? 
> 

I think whatever way is easier for the person maintaining the page would be
best. We've already got a number of man pages in cvs in regular man page
format rather than DocBook thanks to Jochen Voss, who shipped them back
upstream after doing them for Debian.

I'm curious what sort of content the man pages will have, how they will differ
in content from our regular documentation, and what their purpose will be? Is
it simply an underlying requirement (I believe this is the situation with
Debian) that every executable have a man page?

Cheers,
John