Re: Summary of man-page formatting

[Martin Husemann <martin%duskware.de@localhost>]

On Sun, Nov 15, 2020 at 03:10:08AM +0100, Kamil Rytarowski wrote:
> 1. NetBSD base ships with two programs that can format manual pages from
> base and most 3rd party software: BSD mandoc (newest) and GPLv2 groff
> 1.19.2 (old, from 2005).

Ignoring pkgsrc and most parts of what you listed in the part below
that I did not quote - for a  base release build we currently do need
groff as a tool because the release documentation is formatted with it.

Before we can even think about removing groff from base, this would have
to change.

It would probably be relatively easy to switch over the expanding of
variables and the conditional parts to some awk script and do the
formatting with mandoc, but as you mentioned mandoc is not really meant
for such general texts and I don't know what the output would look
like.

It doesn't need to be a 1:1 replacement though, as long as the end result
is nice and readable in the various formats we want.


Martin