[MPlayer-DOCS] Proposal: split manpages

[Carl Fûrstenberg]

On Fri, 22 Oct 2004 21:54:31 +0200, Jonas Jermann <jjermann at gmx.net> wrote:
> 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
> 
> 
> 
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I before attached a little xsl-file that could convert xml to
man-page, it would be easy to add a tag 'only="mencoder"' or
'only="mplayer"', and when parsing it put right thing in right
manpage. also if made in xml there is much easier to produce html.