[Patch v3 2/3] man: partial conversion to pod.

Mark Walters markwalters1009 at gmail.com
Sat Jan 18 03:11:21 PST 2014


I don't have strong views on which format we use for docs. Html has the
nice feature that most people are happy writing it and making doc
writing simple seems a good idea.

One negative for the pod2texi approach is that debian stable does not
have texinfo 5; to test this series I had to build the package from
source. 

Best wishes

Mark




 (html migh have an advantage that most people are happy writing it; eOn Fri, 17 Jan 2014, David Bremner <david at tethera.net> wrote:
> Jani Nikula <jani at nikula.org> writes:
>
>> On Wed, 15 Jan 2014, David Bremner <david at tethera.net> wrote:
>>> From: David Bremner <bremner at debian.org>
>
>> In short, I'm really tempted by using markdown as the format, not least
>> because it's what we use for the web pages. The big (also literally)
>> downside is pandoc (http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/), the tool for
>> converting markdown to man. I don't mind its dependencies, others may
>> disagree. Are there any sensible alternatives to pandoc?
>
> To complicate things, if we did decide on something heavyweight I think
> I'd propose we think about rst instead of markdown. I don't rst as well
> as markdown, but markdown does feel a little too adhoc to me from time
> to time (e.g. a verbatim block forcing the end of a list and so on).
> As far as I can tell, there are many incompatible versions of markdown
> as soon as you start to want e.g. tables.
>
> In any case, rst -> man is supported by python-docutils. sphinx supports
> both man page generation and texinfo output.  So that would be relatively
> lighter weight alternative (??) to pandoc.
>
> A more radical proposal would be to skip generating info and assuming
> everybody can browse html in emacs. That assumption is supposed to
> become less ludicrous in emacs24.4 with the inclusion of "eww".
>
> d
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