Re: Man page generation

[Karl Berry]

    However, info --help doesn't tell me how to get this man output. 

The man support in info is the same as it's always been: if an info page
is not found, then info will exec (as in system(3)) man.  bfox
implemented this many years ago, and I haven't done anything with it.

It seems this feature is not documented :(.  I'll work on that.

    (Actually, I notice that info also doesn't list --usage 

It has been since 4.0, I believe.  It's one of the aliases for -O:
  -O, --show-options, --usage  go to command-line options node.

    which suggests that it's not generally expected to be complete)

Say what?  The --help output should mention all supported options, if
that's you mean.  There have been times when it didn't, but that was a bug.

    One of the problems we've been having recent with the Debian glibc
    package is that people refer to out-of-date man pages.  It would be nice
    if we could generate man pages for all of the C library functions
    automatically somehow.

Yes, it would.  It would also be nice if info had more structure in the
dir file so that all the glibc functions could be listed there, and
someone could say info strcmp and get the strcmp page.  There has been
lots of discussion about ways to make this practical, but no
implementation yet.

    Is there now enough man page support that I could consider submitting
    patches for the glibc texinfo manual?

What kind of patches do you have in mind?  Oh, you mean patches to the
glibc.texinfo manual itself?

At any rate, you'll be sorry to hear that there is no built-in support
in Texinfo for generating man pages.  What I can tell you is that the
gcc man pages are generated from the texinfo manual.  They add comments
like
@c man begin SYNOPSIS
@c man end

to be able to extract the sections.

Perhaps glibc could do something similar.