[CCing the pandoc maintainer, because this might be a feature request.] How do people feel about assuming man(1) is installed where they run "darcs foo --help"?
Darcs currently has four output goals for its documentation: - HTML and PDF (both currently via LaTeX); - roff (via internal kludges) for the manpage; and - plain text, for "darcs foo --help". The first three are straightforward if Darcs documentation is stored internally as reST (or as raw pandoc objects), converted at compile-time using the pandoc library. But Pandoc has no "plain text" output format. I guess the approach normally used is either - Suck it up and read the markdown source; or - Generate HTML and stuff it through e.g. lynx -dump. I think that instead of doing either of these things, when a user runs "darcs foo --help", we use Pandoc to emit *roff* output, dump it to a temp file, then run man(1) or groff on it to generate output on the terminal. The benefits of this approach are that Pandoc doesn't need to be extended with a "plain text" output format, and that users get nice pretty (e.g. bold and underlining) output when they run "darcs foo --help". The down side is that it "darcs help --output" won't work unless man(1) is installed. Another alternative that I don't like would be to have "darcs foo --help" write an HTML file and then run $BROWSER on it, which is kinda like lynx -dump. _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
