I'm trying to install asciidoc on Mac OS X Lion.  I'm getting conflicting 
reports on whether certain backends are installed, e.g. html.  

Following the example given 
at http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/INSTALL.html, I've cloned the source 
with hg and symlinked the executables to my path.

The problem is that the backends which are supposedly built-in don't seem 
to exist according to some tools, but if I pass the backend directly to 
asciidoc, it seems to work.

Here's how it happened, with my thought process at each step.

[Sat Jul 28 09:44:17: /usr/local/bin/asciidoc-8.6.8] asciidoc --backend list
<no output>

I would have expected to see the built-in backends listed here...

Ok, let's try the tests.

[Sat Jul 28 09:43:24: /usr/local/bin/asciidoc-8.6.8] python 
./tests/testasciidoc.py run
1: Test cases
SOURCE: asciidoc: tests/data/testcases.txt
SKIPPED: html4: tests/data/testcases-html4.html
SKIPPED: xhtml11: tests/data/testcases-xhtml11.html
SKIPPED: docbook: tests/data/testcases-docbook.xml
SKIPPED: wordpress: tests/data/testcases-wordpress.html
SKIPPED: html5: tests/data/testcases-html5.html

... snip

TOTAL SKIPPED: 174

They're all skipped, presumably because the backends aren't installed.

Well, let's just try it.

a2x --backend html --destination-dir blah/ --format xhtml --icons-dir 
thirdparty/asciidoc-icons asciidoc.txt 
a2x: ERROR: missing html backend

Ok, now I'm convinced that html is not installed.  Does anything work? 
Let's re-run without passing  a backend, and let it default to something.
a2x --destination-dir blah/ --format xhtml --icons-dir 
thirdparty/asciidoc-icons asciidoc.txt 

a2x: ERROR: "/usr/local/bin/asciidoc-8.6.8/asciidoc.py" --backend docbook 
-a "a2x-format=xhtml"   --out-file "blah/asciidoc.txt" "asciidoc.txt" 
returned non-zero exit status 1

What! That's strange. It looks like a2x is using the docbook backend by 
default, and it's actually outputting a docbook for me (with errors).  But 
I thought asciidoc --backend list has told me that I don't have any 
backends installed. Looks like I'm getting some conflicting information: 
according to what I've seen so far, docbook shouldn't be working at all.

Well, if docbook works when directly passed in, does html?

asciidoc --backend html --out-file "web/htdocs/static/build/asciidoc.xml" 
"web/htdocs/static/asciidoc.txt"

Success!

So I guess my question is, why do a2x and asciidoc --backend list see 
"html" as a missing backend, but asciidoc have no problem with it?  How do 
I tell a2x to pass --backend html to asciidoc? What's the difference 
between a --format and a --backend?

Best regards,

Mason

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