Bug#280148: pod2man should create bold references

[Russ Allbery]

Niko Tyni <ntyni at debian.org> writes:
> On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 11:24:53AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:

>> I'm a little reluctant to change this because pod2man has been using
>> italics since before I started to maintain it.  man-pages(7) is a good
>> reference, though, since it's a concrete style guide with some general
>> weight behind it, although the BSD style guide is also fairly concrete
>> and doesn't add markup.

> If there are non-trivial differences between platform-specific style
> recommendations, how about making the output 'dialect' configurable?  Or
> do you think that's too much bloat?

> I can see problems with functional differences (like enabling '--utf8')
> between dialects, but for purely cosmetic things like bold vs. italic
> this could work.

Hm, that's not a bad idea, although I'm not sure to what degree it will
address the original concern.  I think most man pages generated by pod2man
are generated as part of the build process for Perl or for Perl modules,
where there isn't a good place to add additional options.  It would work
for people running it by hand who wanted a different behavior, though.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>