[MPlayer-DOCS] Proposal: split manpages

[Jonas Jermann]

On Fri, Oct 22, 2004 at 02:17:55PM -0400, D Richard Felker III wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 22, 2004 at 07:24:16PM +0200, Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski wrote:
> > > first we have row 4762 to 7133 that is mencoder only, then it's a lot
> > > of sections marked mplayer only. also it's many places thats marked
> > > only suitable in mplayer/mencoder.
> > > 
> > > I just proposed to split out everything that was mencoder only to a own
> > > manpage.
> > 
> > We've been discussing it with Rich in another thread (last month?)
> > and on IRC. There was an idea to split some common parts like
> > codecs, filters and audio filters into separate manpages. Rich, are
> > you still in favour of that?
> 
> iirc i was never in favor of it, but i might not be too opposed if
> it's done in a sane way. but i really juet like being able to run "man
> mplayer", hit the slash key, and instantly find any topic i want for
> mplayer or mencoder. breaking up into lots of little man pages makes
> finding the info you want a lot slower!

I agree. I don't have a problem with a big man page...

A sane way for me would be to somehow generate both man pages
mplayer.1 and mencoder.1 from a common file, but as (g)roff is soo much broken
you will _most_ probably not be able to do it without conversion problems.
One reason to say this is the mess I saw when I checked how to generate
html/txt/other output _from_ a man page. _Every_ program had it's flaws and we
ended up changing the man page itself to produce a nice html output (imo not
a good idea). It's just a bad, ugly format (imo). ;)

But perhaps it could be done with a normal perl script that uses some meta
information (non visible comments) that converts the huge man page into
mplayer/mencoder parts by just filtering out specific lines, donno...


Regards
	Jonas