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Date:      Tue, 16 Jan 2001 18:24:34 +0000
From:      Nik Clayton <nik@freebsd.org>
To:        Brooks Davis <brooks@one-eyed-alien.net>
Cc:        Nik Clayton <nik@FreeBSD.ORG>, Martin Horcicka <horcicka@vol.cz>, freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: man, TOC, xml...
Message-ID:  <20010116182434.A7327@canyon.nothing-going-on.org>
In-Reply-To: <20010116095547.A13543@Odin.AC.HMC.Edu>; from brooks@one-eyed-alien.net on Tue, Jan 16, 2001 at 09:55:48AM -0800
References:  <Pine.BSF.4.30.0101161434550.25916-100000@k2.vol.cz> <20010116172751.A3414@canyon.nothing-going-on.org> <20010116095547.A13543@Odin.AC.HMC.Edu>

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On Tue, Jan 16, 2001 at 09:55:48AM -0800, Brooks Davis wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 16, 2001 at 05:27:51PM +0000, Nik Clayton wrote:
> > We would not be the first Unix to adopt DocBook for man pages.  Solaris
> > does -- Solaris 7 had a mix of DocBook and traditional *roff manual
> > pages, and, AIUI, Solaris 8 is all DocBook (or rather, SolBook, Sun's
> > custom, cut down version of DocBook).
> > 
> > I would support an effort to get DocBook in to the base system, but I
> > don't have the time right now to drive such an effort.  I will, however,
> > cheerfully sit on the sidelines shouting encouragement and offering
> > advice.
> 
> I looked at what Solaris does a while back and they used a script called
> sgml2roff for formatting.  sgml2roff is derived from docbook-to-man.sh
> which you can get under an X11 license at:
> 
> http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/tools/dtm/

Useful info.  Don't suppose you've tried that on FreeBSD have you?

> They actually created a parallel man hierarchy for SGML manpages in
> /usr/share/man/sman*.  This seems like the approch to take if someone
> wants to work on this.  It looks like the required infrastructure is
> nsgmls from Jade or OpenJade and DocBook itself.  I suspect that people
> will want to modify this stuff to generate mdoc or mdocNG instead of man
> macros in the roff output.
> 
> Of course, this thing creates tons of bikeshed issues.  For instance, if
> someone really was crazy enough to try to fight the battle to move
> manpages into the doc tree, doing it during a conversion to SGML would
> be the best opportunity that's likely to come along.

I don't want to bring man pages under the doc/ hierarchy -- I want to
put DocBook (and an XML processor) under the src/ hierarchy. . .

N
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