Hi.
> I agree with you that putting man pages
> into texinfo sources is nontrivial and not necessarily the ideal method.
>
> The best approach to building man pages that I know of is to use the
> help2man program to convert --help into a man page.
Unfortunately I have to disagree. The "--help" stuff should be a
quick summary, while the manual should be a detailed and comprehensive
source of information.
ostro% gawk --help | wc -l
22
ostro% man gawk | wc -l
1914
Ok, let's remove blank and dulpicated lines:
ostro% man gawk | sort -u | wc -l
1223
ostro% gcc --help
gcc: No input files
oops :)
ostro% man gcc | wc -l
3564
ostro% man gcc | sort -u | wc -l
2314
Also, whenever a package includes more than executable files you need
man pages for several chapters, not just the exe.1.
It's not an issue for me as an author, as I'll keep preprocessing my
texinfo source to extract complete man pages. But I think most users
won't be happy with either the output of --help or the output of
help2man.
Regards
/alessandro
