[Pkg-crosswire-devel] Man pages and their source format

[Jonathan Marsden]

Dmitrijs Ledkovs wrote:

>> I may attempt that; I've also thought of just converting them all by
>> hand into *.1 files, and so avoiding the need for all the pod2man stuff
>> completely.  It would be nice to shrink debian/rules back down :)

> It would be nice to shrink debian/rules but *.pod is the source.
> The converted *.1 would be hard to edit cause they are obscure
> (equiv. to binary).

Not if you "convert" by re-rwiting them hand; *roff source is not any
more opaque than LaTeX or POD, really.  All are code based markup languages.

I've started a public branch for this process, and written two man pages
addld.1 and imp2gbs.1 from scratch, including more detailed info than
the earlier .pod ones did.  I intend to do this for all of the .pod man
pages over time.  The bzr branch is at
lp:~pkgcrosswire/libsword/nroff-manpages

Jonathan