Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 08:37:41 +0200 From: Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai <asmodai@wxs.nl> To: Tim Vanderhoek <vanderh@ecf.utoronto.ca> Cc: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>, Mike Pritchard <mpp@mpp.pro-ns.net>, Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>, rnordier@nordier.com, doc@freebsd.org, nik@freebsd.org Subject: Re: cvs commit: src/sbin/disklabel disklabel.8 Message-ID: <19990803083741.B58351@daemon.ninth-circle.org> In-Reply-To: <19990802225533.A19050@mad>; from Tim Vanderhoek on Mon, Aug 02, 1999 at 10:55:34PM -0400 References: <199908010038.KAA16506@godzilla.zeta.org.au> <199908011141.GAA02125@mpp.pro-ns.net> <19990803113759.J62948@freebie.lemis.com> <19990802225533.A19050@mad>
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[ redirect to doc, add nik to cc: ] * Tim Vanderhoek (vanderh@ecf.utoronto.ca) [990803 07:13]: > On Tue, Aug 03, 1999 at 11:37:59AM +0930, Greg Lehey wrote: > > > > > > Arghhhh! Man pages should never use direct *roff command for > > > formatting. > > > > Why not? Because our forefathers did it that way? > > Because using strictly mdoc will make it easier to change all the > manpages to DocBook? Now this is interesting. The advantage, at least in my perspective, is that mdoc is fast, can be generated on the fly quickly with *roff and the markup is easy once you get the hang of it [which is with all ML's]. DocBook on the other hand has a lot of dependencies which slow it down to a degree where I am not sure simple on-the-fly creation will be wanted. Say we move all the stuff of the manpages to DocBook [which will need major surgery to include all the prior semantics of the mdoc macros btw], we will need at least make sure the new man command either has a built-in SGML parser or it will need to depend on that. Plus it will need the DTD's to be installed somewhere on the system. Plus it's depending on jade. There's no mistaking that the new manpage system will be much larger, less arcane [if ye feel that the learning curve for learning SGML / DocBook is substantially lower than mdoc *roff macros], slower on a lot of systems [we want on the fly generating of pages]. I would like to hear some comments on this because it might truly be the way to proceed on, but I still have some doubts and blanks about how to realise a few goals. 'gards, -- Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven asmodai(at)wxs.nl The BSD Programmer's Documentation Project <http://home.wxs.nl/~asmodai>; Network/Security Specialist BSD: Technical excellence at its best Cum angelis et pueris, fideles inveniamur. Quis est iste Rex gloriae...? To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message
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