Mailing List Archive: this whole 'docbook-to-man' thing.

this whole 'docbook-to-man' thing.

Dec 20, 1999, 6:49 PM

Post #1 of 3 (514 views)

'
whose bright idea was that anyways?

i shouldn't need to be installing other packages outside of my vendor merely to read a man page. its really aggrevating. especially since i couldn't find what docbook to man was part of. freshmeat didn't know anything about it, and i wasn't going to scoure the entire net looking for it.

how about having it check to see if you have said program before having the manpage require it?

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Re: this whole 'docbook-to-man' thing. [ In reply to ]

wk at gnupg

Dec 21, 1999, 1:05 AM

Post #2 of 3 (506 views)

Permalink

On Mon, Dec 20, 1999 at 08:49:18PM -0500
R. Emory Lundberg wrote:

> whose bright idea was that anyways?

I have decided to use the docbook DTD for all documentation;
unfortunately the needed tools are not easy available (although
Debian has most of them). The main problems are converting SGML to a
man pages and to texinfo. Docbook-to-man is quite an old tool but it
works.

The problem with the last version was that somehow the timestamps
got corrupted (due to rsyncing between my laptop and the desktop?)
and there was only the dummy man page (there is no docbook-to-man on
my laptop).

We will in future replace the old docbook-to-man by a more modern
toolkit which is also able to create texinfo files. It works by first
converting Docbook to Docbook-XML and the creating the output formats.
The advantage is that this toolkit is maintained. It is just due to
the usual time constraints.

It takes me too long to make a new version just for including the man
page. Please take the man page from the FTP servers and copy it to
/usr/local/man/man1 or whereever your system expects it.

I apologize for all this trouble.

Werner

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Re: this whole 'docbook-to-man' thing. [ In reply to ]

Pete.Chown at skygate

Dec 21, 1999, 8:25 AM

Post #3 of 3 (506 views)

Permalink

R. Emory Lundberg wrote:

> ... i couldn't find what docbook to man was part of.
> freshmeat didn't know anything about it, and i wasn't going to
> scoure the entire net looking for it.

If anyone is interested, docbook to man is at:

http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/tools/index.html

I came across it by chance a while ago, having thought for a long time
that no such tool existed.

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