Garrett, First, I'm generally supportive - especially of a tool that can generate decent output in other formats.
Question/comments inline: On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 8:05 PM, Garrett D'Amore via illumos-discuss < [email protected]> wrote: > > > For a variety of reasons, I'm proposing that we import mandoc (see http://mdocml.bsd.lv for details) into illumos, and move to using mdoc for formatting man pages. > > d) mandoc toolset is nice and small -- simpler than *roff and co. Very lightweight mandocdb imports db - would we import that as an additional dependency, or drop mandocdb? > > e) mandoc supports native generation of PDF, PostScript, HTML, and text. > > f) There are folks actually continuing to sustain and improve this tool chain. Solaris (err AT&T) derived troff and nroff by comparison are practically dead, and almost undebuggable with horrible code written back when linkers didn't support symbols with more than 6 characters in them. So what happens to our nroff/troff? Do they get torched? > > g) mandoc can format man(5) pages as well. So importing from foreign sources should be straight-forward. Presumably, then, we wouldn't have to update all the manpages in one go, we could still display the unconverted ones? > > I am specifically suggesting that any support SGML markup be tossed. (Actually, that has mostly already happened -- we don't support sgml2roff anymore, although man(1) seems to have some of the legacy support still in it.)` Yup. Torch it. Was a thoroughly bad idea. > > I'm also not proposing to support pre formatted man pages. Does anyone use those? That would be me. I use preformatted files to give a noticeable performance boost (and a version of man that uses the windex files to give another boost). I would hope that mandoc isn't any slower than current tools. > Likewise, man.cf seems to be undocumented, and is not even present on my system. I wonder, do people use/depend on it? Again, yes - largely to ensure that the sections are searched in the correct order. But that's largely a hangover from having so much legacy junk around - if the man pages were sensibly named and well organised, you probably wouldn't need it. -- -Peter Tribble http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/ ------------------------------------------- illumos-discuss Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/182180/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/182180/21175430-2e6923be Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21175430&id_secret=21175430-6a77cda4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
