Comments inline...
On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 1:02 PM, Peter Tribble <[email protected]> wrote: > 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? > > I'm not sure off hand. If we import it, it would be private. I notice that later versions seem to use sqlite3 -- but I'm not sure about the db version. I presume this is to support apropos, maybe we don't even need it? > > > > > 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? > Good question. I'd torch them if it were up to me. I suppose in theory someone might have some content in .ms or something like that (I wrote papers in .ms macros when I was in school). My preference would be to eject them from the illumos-gate, and let folks get them from another repository if they really want them. My gut is that nobody uses these for anything except man pages. > > > > > > 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? > Right. > > > > > > 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. > Agreed. But there are also environment variables for controlling this behavior? Is there any actual documentation anywhere that describes the contents or format of man.cf? > > -- > -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
