on Sat, Sep 22, 2001 at 01:41:23PM -0400, Michael P. Soulier ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > Hey people. > > Is there a decent way to translate from info to man? I personally hate > info pages, and I'd like to convert and contribute some converted info > documentation. I greatly prefer man. > > I know there are tools to convert info and man to html, and that's a > decent format when read with lynx. Maybe the answer would be to convert all to > html, and then write a front-end for lynx so I could type (help <page>) and it > would invoke lynx on the appropriate page.
Not directly:
http://www.gnu.org/manual/texinfo/html_node/texinfo_5.html
But:
If you wish to support man pages, the program @command{help2man} may
be useful; it generates a traditional man page from the `--help'
output of a program. In fact, this is currently used to generate man
pages for the Texinfo programs themselves. It is free software
written by Brendan O'Dea, available from
http://www.ozemail.com.au/~bod/help2man.tar.gz.
Note too that Debian Policy prefers man pages for all packages, so if
you do find a package lacking a (current) manpage, file a bug. If
you've got the option to do so, create or update the manpage yourself.
http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-docs.html#s13.1
Each program, utility, and function should have an associated
manpage included in the same package. It is suggested that all
configuration files also have a manual page included as well.
If no manual page is available for a particular program, utility,
function or configuration file and this is reported as a bug to the
Debian Bug Tracking System, a symbolic link from the requested
manual page to the undocumented(7) manual page may be provided. This
symbolic link can be created from debian/rules like this:
ln -s ../man7/undocumented.7.gz \
debian/tmp/usr/share/man/man[1-9]/requested_manpage.[1-9].gz
This manpage claims that the lack of a manpage has been reported as
a bug, so you may only do this if it really has (you can report it
yourself, if you like). Do not close the bug report until a proper
manpage is available.
You may forward a complaint about a missing manpage to the upstream
authors, and mark the bug as forwarded in the Debian bug tracking
system. Even though the GNU Project do not in general consider the
lack of a manpage to be a bug, we do; if they tell you that they
don't consider it a bug you should leave the bug in our bug tracking
system open anyway.
Manual pages should be installed compressed using gzip -9.
If one manpage needs to be accessible via several names it is better
to use a symbolic link than the .so feature, but there is no need to
fiddle with the relevant parts of the upstream source to change from
.so to symlinks: don't do it unless it's easy. You should not create
hard links in the manual page directories, nor put absolute
filenames in .so directives. The filename in a .so in a manpage
should be relative to the base of the manpage tree (usually
/usr/share/man). If you do not create any links (whether symlinks,
hard links, or .so directives) in the filesystem to the alternate
names of the manpage, then you should not rely on man finding your
manpage under those names based solely on the information in the
manpage's header.[56]
NB: I went through the printcap manpage a few weeks back (it's mostly
unformatted verbatim text, wraps horribly, etc.), and submitted it to
the lprng package maintainer. Haven't heard from him since. Anyone
know protocol for getting manpage updates submitted?
Peace.
--
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
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