Re: Manpage generation

[Eli Zaretskii]

On Sun, 7 Apr 2002, Zack Weinberg wrote:

> > > >>>>> "Karl" == Karl Berry <address@hidden> writes:
> > > Karl> Tom Tromey just suggested the same thing.  I haven't had a
> > > Karl> chance to look at what you've done yet.  It seems impossible to
> > > Karl> me that the same text can be used for man pages and real
> > > Karl> manuals?  One or the other must surely suffer.
> 
> It turns out to be relatively easy.  The key realization is that a
> manpage for a program isn't _supposed_ to contain the complete content
> of its manual.  A couple of paragraphs of overview, plus a complete
> list of command line options, is fine.
> 
> So, what my program does is interpret magic comments that select
> chunks of the Texinfo source to be rendered into POD and thence
> manpage troff.

This might prove very difficult with some manuals, where the necessary 
information is spread across many nodes.  My canonical example is the 
manual from Tar 1.12.  Emacs comes as a close runner-up.  I guess Karl 
was thinking about something like those examples when he said it seemed 
impossible.

I think the issue is whether generation of man pages from a Texinfo 
manual is possible without forcing the Texinfo author to invest a 
significant amount of work (like adding those man-page-only parts, or 
deciding what parts of the Texinfo manual should go into the man page).  
Because if the author does have to invest a significant effort, she 
might just go ahead and maintain a man page ;-)