Subject: Re: how to write man pages
To: netbsd-help <netbsd-help@netbsd.org>
From: James K. Lowden <jklowden@schemamania.org>
List: netbsd-help
Date: 02/12/2002 23:31:19
On Tue, Feb 12, 2002 at 02:21:42AM -0500, James K. Lowden wrote:
> Hi all, 
> 
> Every time I think about writing man pages, I look at mdoc.samples
> and think, that looks *hard*.  Isn't there an easier way?  No smgl and
> dsssl or xslt for man pages?  

Many thanks, everyone.  To summarize the answers:

1.	groff-mode in emacs

2.	Use /usr/share/mdoc.template and refer to
	http://tylx.tripod.com/groff-resources.html

3.	Docbook + http://mama.sourceforge.net/perl/current/doc/html/
	yields groff
	
4.	Hack an existing man page until it says what you want.

5.	Use perl pod notation + pod2man

FWIW, I like solution (3) best, because I do know docbook and because
I'd like the manual source code to be tractable to people doing other
(sgml-based) documentation.  I'm also a perlhead, so solution (5) has
personal appeal, too. Leave it to Larry to make a hard thing easy.  

The Veins-in-my-Teeth award goes of course to Andrew Brown, who
actually *likes* sendmail.cf.  Obviously, a real man's hacker.  :)

OK, I'm off.  I have to allocate infinite time to a million monkeys.  

Regards, 

--jkl