FreeTDS Development Group

[James K. Lowden <jklowden AT speakeasy.org>]

On Mon, 9 Sep 2002 10:18:49 -0400, "Castellano, Nicholas"
<Nicholas_Castellano AT acml.com> wrote:

> Wouldn't it be cleaner to just convert to man format once and for all,
> and throw away the plaintext versions of these files?  Then you don't
> need to distribute txt2man, and it seems like it would be less error
> prone.

I've resisted learning man format for years, and I'm not giving up now. :)

Seriously, txt2man is a small bit of magic for people not in the manpage
writing business.  Instead of learning yet another markup (and a none too
modern one at that), all the budding manpage author has to do is mock up a
page according to some *very* simple rules, and presto, out comes a man
page.  

If sgml processing were a little easier to set up, I'd write the man pages
in sgml and process them as I do the DocBook UG.  That still wouldn't be
as easy, but at least I wouldn't be hiring a gadget to do the markup.  

I'm hoping -- it's a bit of a stretch, I realise -- to encourage others to
contribute man pages by making it easy.  But maybe I'm just encouraging
myself.  

--jkl