Re: Man-writing volunteers?

[Juergen Weigert]

Thomas, thanks for stepping forward!
Personally, I also prefer manpages. Probably mostly because
I know how to search and jump with less.

On Aug 12, 08 17:45:08 +0100, Thomas Adam wrote:
> I will state at this point, categorically, that although being true to
> GNU's roots is nice, I am dead against texinfo pages -- *no* one
> actually reads them; heck, the existing info viewer is an abomination,
> pinfo is "OK" but is not ubiquitous so it's out of the running for
> most people.  No... I seriously suggest we just make the manpage a
> fore-runner -- at least an "official" representation of our
> documentation.


Having only a texinfo page, is not that bad.
- one could always do 'info gdb | less' as a workaround.
- It just looks great, when printed on paper.

> > To my mind, unifying on a single source format would be the best
> > long-term approach, rather than having two manuals maintained. So far,
> > the approach that makes the most sense to me is to use the Texinfo as
> > the source document, generating the manpage with texi2pod.pl (see Wget's
> > Texinfo documentation for an understanding of this; note that, even with
> > texi2pod.pl, however, Wget's man page is still very much inferior to
> > their Texinfo counterparts: only a small portion is translated into the
> > man page). However, for Screen this would require texi2pod.pl to be
> > modified to allow arbitrary sections to be transmitted (it only allows
> > the standard ones, currently).
> 
> Or use asciidoc or txt2tags, etc.

I like that plan!

        cheers,
                Jw.

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