Re: [Nano-devel] info page question

[David Lawrence Ramsey]

*John M. Gabriele wrote:
> --- Chris Allegretta <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Info format is the official docuemntation format of the GNU project, 
sez
>> RMS.  I had to add it in order for nano to be a GNU program.  Don't 
know
>> if it's still required...

Thanks for the heads up.  Unfortunately, info is still required for GNU
projects.  I've looked into it, and

http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html

says the following, in bold:

"Don't make the primary documentation for any GNU software be a man
page. Write a manual in Texinfo instead. Man pages are just for the sake
of people running GNU software on Unix, which is a secondary application
only."

> Bash is a GNU project and has got a man page a mile long
> (here on Debian Stable anyway). The bash info docs seem
> to be just a straight copy of the man page (I'd guess
> generated using the man2texi tool).
>
> http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/texinfo.html
> has a link to man2texi at the bottom:
> http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/man2texi/
>
> So, if you're already editing the man page by hand,
> that might be an option for you (caveat: I've never
> used texinfo nor man2texi).

Interesting.  I've tried it, however, and there are several problems
with it:

1. It can't handle the escaped plus sign used in "+LINE[,COLUMN]"
properly.

2. It can't display the modification date properly, adding an unneeded "
to one end of it but not the other.

3. It divides every section into a separate page, with no accompanying
text explaining what the sections are, except for the section names.

Of course, man2texi's output could be manually tweaked after it's
generated, but I think that the need for that defeats the purpose of
man2texi in the first place.  Thanks for suggesting it, though.

So, in light of all this, it appears that we're stuck with the info page
for the time being.  Thanks for everyone's feedback anyway.

*