[MPlayer-DOCS] Proposal: split manpages

[D Richard Felker III]

On Fri, Oct 22, 2004 at 10:58:26PM +0200, Jonas Jermann wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> In my opinion there are two problems with this:
> 
> 1) Someone has to do it. ;)
> 2) I don't trust converters, they often lead to problems in one or
>    another way especially with roff as it is full of small
>    macros/stuff that don't seem to make sense...
> 
> Personally I'd really prefer to keep the documentation in the form it
> will be distributed. The xml documentation is a bit an exception but the
> man page is really mainly used as the man page, so I don't see much sense
> in using a common format.

i'm absolutely against xml for the man page unless the xml->man
conversion can be done with no external dependencies whatsoever. it's
bad enough to need some silly xml progs to generate the docs (but i
don't read docs anymore anyway, or if i do i can just find them on the
website). but not being able to read the manpage from cvs without
having special doc tools installed would really suck!! (and it would
lead to users not rtfm'ing!!! :/ )

rich