[MPlayer-DOCS] Proposal: split manpages

[D Richard Felker III]

On Sat, Oct 23, 2004 at 03:14:48PM +0200, Carl Fûrstenberg wrote:
> 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
> 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.

how does this have any relation to what i said??
if the install procedure depends on stupid xml tools which i don't
have, it's not going to work!!

rich