[MPlayer-dev-eng] Is anyone considering docbook for the man page ?

Alban Bedel albeu at free.fr
Tue Mar 18 18:11:49 CET 2003


Hi Dirk,

on Tue, 18 Mar 2003 17:00:03 +0100 you wrote:

> Alban Bedel wrote:
> 
> >Hi Diego Biurrun,
> >
> >on Tue, 18 Mar 2003 01:34:42 +0100 you wrote:
> >
> >  
> >
> >>The man page is in for an overhaul, no question,
> >>maybe even the idea of putting mplayer and mencoder together needs to
> >>be revisited.  If you have any bright ideas, step forward.  In the
> >>meantime I think that redundancy is our worst enemy.
> >>    
> >>
> >
> >I agree with you, fight the redundancy !!!!!
> >I'd like to say that I would like to have (someday) a kind of
> >integreted help as the man page is growing way to big now. By
> >integrated help i mean the possiblity of having mplayer document it
> >self. Something like'mplayer -describe fs' would ouput what the man
> >page is saying about this option.
> >
> In our project we finally ended with using a simple struct...
> 
> typedef struct
> {
>   int val;  // same val as getopt() returnes after parsing another arg 
> successfully
>   char *option_s; // the option as string... same string as used in 
> struct option
>   char *optarg; // optarg
>   char *desc;    // the simple usage
>  char *more_desc;   // MORE explanation
> // (void)
> } st_usage_t;
> 
> then we made an array of this including EVERY option we have..
> 
> st_usage_t usage[] =
> {
>   {OPT_HELP, "help", NULL, "help output", "i said help output.."},
>   ...
> 
> }

Having the help in the source code is bad imho. 1) translation are harder,
2) doc writers have to mess in the code. 3) ....
I considered this solution too but abandoned it for the reasons i writed
above (and i'm sure there is many others reasons that aren't comming to
mind atm)
	Albeu


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