Hi,
I'd like to have automake generate man pages from a texinfo file (or DocBook, or some other format) using a suitable tool. How could that be achieved?
I don't know what that question is asking for actually - suffix rules are written just like in plain make, nothing special for automake (appart from registering the suffix but that's documented in `pinfo automake`).
If you are unsure as to what master format would be used, there are a set of options. For example, look at the gnu server for help2man which is a perl script that turns the `program --help` screen into a man.1 page, this is quite common with debian packages as their policy requires a man page for each program.
Personally, I prefer a docbook reference page (i.e. "<!doctype reference") and the xml stylesheets from docbook org along with "xmlto" that builds on top of libxml/xsltproc. That tool can be fetched from redhat servers and works fine with other distros as well.
The usage of "xmlto" hides much of the complexity, just write a docbook reference page and type xmlto man manpages.dbk
When it comes to API documentation (man 3 type) then you could use any source extractor tool that can generate reference-type docbook format from source code comments. However, I'm generally using just a few perl lines shipped along with some of my projects to do it, it's not hard to write such a thing (see http://zziplib.sf.net).
-- have fun, guido http://freespace.sf.net/guidod
