On Mon, 27 Sep 2010, Guenter wrote:

> I was looking into some man page converters, and while on this I found that
> our man pages have all different internal dates and versions mentioned; with
> some its certainly wrong since they were modified after the listed date ...;
> so question is: what date should the man pages list? Last modification date?
> Or should they always be updated with release version and date? Sure, this
> seems more of cosmetic nature ...

Right, it's so cosmetic we haven't bothered much to keep it consistent. I
update that field once in a while when I remember it. I'm not aware of
anything that really uses it or care about what date it says.

> The reason why I checked through the man pages was mainly because I was
> looking for way to easily create the other manual formats on Win32 platform,
> and specially also to create a .chm ... for this I found halibut:
> http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/halibut/ but unfortunately it
> has its own format, and so it would be required to convert the existing man
> pages to the halibut input format ... but the benefit would then be that we
> could output all other formats with one tool which seems to run on every
> platform (I did already compile a halibut Win32 executable) ...

Sounds like an easy enough system that could work. Have you tried converting
one of our man pages into this Halibut format to see how a typical input file
would look like?

I suspect its HTML output format doesn't have the fancy link concept that
roffit does, but possibly we can have Halibut generate man pages and run
roffit on those to generate the kind of HTML we have these days.

-- 
  / daniel.haxx.se
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