Harlan Stenn wrote:
> Bruce,
>
> How goes?
>
> I'm getting ready to create some idea lists for the upcoming google
> summer of code project.
>
> One of the ideas I want to list is the one that would "extend" the
> autogen documentation stuff to make it easier to produce man pages,
> etc. from the doc strings in the .def files, things like mdoc directives
> (for example).
>
> As an aside, I'm still wondering if it would be "better" to let folks
> write the doc strings using any of a list of stated "modes" (mdoc,
> perldoc, texi, etc) and then have autogen import the strings into some
> generally-useful internal format, and then emit suitably-massaged output
> for each requested output format.
Such flexibility is always nice, given arbitrary amounts of development
time. :)
> Anyway, if somebody were to bite on this project there would have to be
> a "mentor" for them to talk to. I am happy to help with that but at
> least as far as autogen goes, I am probably not the best person.
>
> Might you be up for doing some or all of any mentoring on this project,
> should somebody be brave enough to take it on?
Before handing it off to a student, you'd have to decide upon a reasonable
"canonical" format, and then emit whatever you like from there.
If you look at the way the man page templates are set up, you can
see that there is a fairly straight forward mechanism for converting
stuff:
[= (out-push-new) =]
<<<emit canonical format text>>>
[= (out-push-new) =][=
CASE desired-type =][=
== mdoc =][= (define desired-type-suffix ".mdoc") =]
<<<emit canonical-to-mdoc script>>>
[=
== man =][= (define desired-type-suffix ".1") =]
<<<emit canonical-to-man script>>>
[=
== texi =][= (define desired-type-suffix ".texi") =]
<<<emit canonical-to-texi script>>>
[=
ESAC
=][= ;; assume "perl" is the scripting language:
(shell (string-append "perl -e "
(raw-shell-str (out-pop #t))
" > " (base-name) desired-type-suffix
" <<\\_EOF_\n"
(out-pop #t)
"\n_EOF_"
))
=]
Hopefully one of the "desired-type"s would be the canonical format,
making it a no-op transform. And, of course, nobody would try to run
this on a command line size limited machine. :)
So, I'd be willing to help someone get started. You'd have to be
the primary mentor tho.
Cheers - Bruce
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