Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1999 16:22:53 +0100 From: Nik Clayton <nik@freebsd.org> To: Tim Singletary <tsingle@triana.gsfc.nasa.gov> Cc: freebsd-doc@freebsd.org Subject: Re: *roff (was Re: cvs commit: src/sbin/disklabel disklabel.8) Message-ID: <19990804162253.C10882@kilt.nothing-going-on.org> In-Reply-To: <14247.13622.448962.288634@sungod.gsfc.nasa.gov>; from Tim Singletary on Tue, Aug 03, 1999 at 02:30:14PM -0400 References: <14247.13622.448962.288634@sungod.gsfc.nasa.gov>
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On Tue, Aug 03, 1999 at 02:30:14PM -0400, Tim Singletary wrote:
> > One of the 'killer-apps' that's missing from DocBook is a good, standard,
> > mechanism to go from DocBook to *roff based markup. We have DocBook
> > to HTML, plain text, PostScript, PDF, and RTF, but not *roff.
>
> Why not just let *roff wither and die?
The large number of system manual pages that are written in it, and the
even larger number of third party manual pages that are written in it.
> nroff by way of man is the
> best excuse for keeping it, but how hard would it be to modify man to
> understand DocBook input and start the appropriate pipeline to convert
> DocBook to plain text?
Hard enough that no-one's done it yet. If someone were to do it then it
would provide us with a more compelling reason to shift to DocBook for
the manual pages, but without that tool there's no way it's going to happen.
What we need is someone to volunteer to do it, and place it under a BSD
license. I imagine that a GPL 'system-manual-page-viewer' would not be
accepted by -core (and I think they'd be right to do so).
N
--
[intentional self-reference] can be easily accommodated using a blessed,
non-self-referential dummy head-node whose own object destructor severs
the links.
-- Tom Christiansen in <375143b5@cs.colorado.edu>
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