Re: Generating 'cat' pages on make install

[Jason Curl]

Bob Proulx wrote:
> Jason Curl wrote:
>   
> > Continuing with my efforts of making a library designed for Linux a bit 
> > usable for colleagues on Windows I'd like to figure out how to install 
> > "cat" pages, i.e. conversions of "man" pages.
> >     
>
> Hmm...  Would it make more sense to set up 'man' on ms-windows for
> your colleagues such that it would generate the man pages correctly?
> I would think that would be easier.
>   
It doesn't make too much sense, else they'd already have Cygwin or 
something installed. They're windows users, not unix users.
> The problem is that the location and formating of the man-cat pages is
> different everywhere.  Different 'man' systems do different things
> with with them because 'man' is not standardized on every system.  The
> man-cat pages are cache for the 'man' program and different 'man'
> programs have made different choices.
>
> Additionally the terminal column width is a terminal specific
> difference that even on the same system with the same user there might
> be two different formattings.  This can be mitigated by
> forcing/assuming a standard 80-character wide terminal though.
>   
So let's assume I've got a command on my build environment

groff -Tascii -mandoc myman.3 | col -b > mycat.3

I might even extend this to generate HTML instead of ASCII.

Later I'd be implementing a Perl script to convert what is in code 
comments to something else to then generate the man pages. These man 
pages document an API.
>   
> > I can write a script that will do the conversion for me, but I'd ideally 
> > like to have a rule that will convert the 'man' page for me to 'cat' in 
> > the correct directory when installing.
> >     
>
> Unfortunately there is no one "correct" directory.
>   
Well, the Autoconf has a system /share/man/man3/myman.3. I would then 
think it makes most sense to have it copied to /share/cat/cat3/myman.3
> Personally I would look into teaching them to use man on windows to
> view the man pages.  That seems to me like it would be the easier
> approach.  And then it would be all set up for other Unix-derived
> commands in the future.
>
> Even better for GNU-derived software would be to set up the info pages
> so that the info documentation would be available.  For the GNU
> project info documentation is the usually is the preferred
> documentation format.
>
> Bob
Well, may be I'll rephrase the question: Given a list of man pages in my 
Makefile.am, how can I write or extend automake (hopefully easily) to 
use that list that is already defined to run a command and copy it 
somewhere on make install, using the example I've provided?

I'd like to keep it in Automake if possible rather than having 
preconfigure, postconfigure scripts.

Thanks,
Jason.