Ken Irving <jkirving@mosquitonet.com> écrit:

I haven't looked at help2man, but I'm guessing it makes a manified file in the man directories.

Let me see... Yes: http://www.ozemail.com.au/~bod/help2man-1.020.tar.gz, if you are curious. No, it just produce a `man' page on standard output, out of `PROGRAM --help' and `PROGRAM --version'. This is done on the maintainer side, while preparing a distribution. The distributed, ready man page is then installed by the Makefile generated by Automake. I fine-tuned this a tiny bit to overcome limitations which users reported. My best shot at it, so far, should be demonstrated in the latest `recode' pretest, at http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/contrib/recode/recode-3.5c.tar.gz. The key point was to generate the `man' page from `src/Makefile', rather than from `doc/Makefile' as I first thought it should be. The reason to distribute the `man' page pre-made is that `make install' on the user side is not allowed to depend on Perl, per GNU standards (in fact, this is said negatively: the standards list which programs are allowed, and Perl is not there).

I wonder if this could be done on the fly [...]

Everything is possible, of course. This might be a change (in the mentality of how such things are done), I guess it might not be wise to rush it. All your argumentation does stress, in my eyes (which have nothing to do with the eyes of the FSF, by the way!) that there is a problem in that area. But we know that, don't we? :-)

I suppose the man command itself could be extended to try help2man on an argument with no manpage. Similarly, while the info system is not flat, and thus not easily converted to manpages, I wonder if there is a way to make an interface to info docs through the man facility?

That would be a sensible approach. `info' currently tries `man', but I remember having been unsatisfied that `info' did not try hard to at least look as appealing as `man' does, and the maintainer at the time was just not interested. Now, the thing is in the hands of Karl Berry, who his a very nice, very speakable guy (yet, able to have ideas and follow a line of thought, do not mistake being nice and being weak :-). I heard that Texinfo 4.0 has major improvements over previous versions, but I did not come to try it yet. What would be nice, to get out of that religious war, is that `man' and `info', or `lynx', or `hilf' (whatever the name :-), try harder to get hold on the documentation in whatever form it has, and inter-operate better.

Each help/documentation mechanism has its pros and cons, and I doubt if the *nix world is ready for one true standard.

HTML and other things is being attempted as a unifying format, but the browsers are often heavy beasts which start _by far_ too slowly, and lack very useful features that `info' has, like indexes and searching. A proper tool might still have to be written, despite many attempts in the recent years. `lynx' could have been close, maybe. Getting wide acceptance, given the competition and religious wars, might take years, if it ever happens. If only people were genuinely trying to solve the real problem, instead of pushing for a particular viewpoint. :-) I once thought `info' was to be it, as people writing GNU software often try very enthusiastically to make it the best in its category, but I'm not so sure that `info' is progressive enough to stand a chance. It had a good start at the very beginning, but soon started to lag, and in the meantime, got a few ferocious enemies (a bit beyond reason). Is it a lost cause? Who really knows what will happen...

Perhaps the "No manual entry for tar" message could be extended to suggest other approaches, e.g.,

No manual entry for tar (try 'info tar', 'tar --help', 'tar -h', ...)

Another good idea. I hope it will reach people taking care of `man'. It would be nicer if the suggestion made by `man' was dependable. I guess people would soon dislike being sent to random fishing.

...

I guess I could write entertaining and unbelievable chapters on the real history of `tar' documentation :-).

I'd be entertained to read it.

Yes, maybe. I'd probably get angry if I started to remember it, and I do not really feel like negative emotions. Worse, the anger might propagate to you as well, and there is so much nicer and more productive ways to be! :-) -- François Pinard http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/