[MPlayer-DOCS] Proposal: split manpages

[Carl Fûrstenberg]

On Sat, 23 Oct 2004 00:17:33 -0400, D Richard Felker III
<dalias at aerifal.cx> wrote:
> 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
> 
> 
> 
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how often does the user type "man -l
$BUILD_ROOT/DOCS/man/en/mplayer.1", no, probably they type "man
mplayer" and that is AFTER the install-procedure is done.