"Dennis A. Evans" wrote:
> > I did a quick look at DocBook/XML support for
> > /usr/bin/man - AFAIK it
> > should be easy to implement since all neccesary tools
> > (e.g. "xsltproc"
> > and the "DocBook/XML--->*roff"-stylesheets) are
> > installed...
>
> I agree. When we added the SGML support it was a
> fairly simple matter of identifying the source type,
> ie nroff vs sgml, and then branching to a different
> processing path.
>
> Because nroff has a built in formatting capability,
> we decided to convert sgml to nroff to take advantage
> of that.
... except that this limits the output capabilities to those of the
nroff output... ;-(
> The same could be done with XML source. Or for that
> matter sgml source.
>
> The processing tools that turned the sgml source
> are open source as well but I had always wanted to
> use something like James Clark's SX to convert to xml
> and then use the other xml tools to process into nroff.
IMO it may be "better" to just ship the DocBook/{SGML,XML}-files instead
of the nroff sources... that would solve lots of trouble and may even be
more friendly to translators.
> The ultimate project was to provide a curses-based
> viewer that would use stylesheets to display the xml
> directly.
See below (comment about "DocZilla") ...
> So I've always viewed the improvements of the man
> command as a stagged project.
>
> There is an old PSARC case that documents the curses viewer.
Well... there is "DocZilla" (http://www.doczilla.com/) which could be
used as basis for a more advanched DocBook viewer in Solaris (and Sun
has AFAIK the money to buy it and merge it into the main
Mozilla/Seamonkey mainline... :-) ) ...
... but for now I'd like to stay "simple" and just provide a way to get
DocBook/XML manual pages supported "out of the box" without the need to
_store_ the nroff format anywhere on the disk. IMO this would be a huge
improvement.
> > ... questions:
> > - Where should /usr/bin/man look for DocBook/XML
> > manual pages - in
> > ${MANPATHELEMENT}/sman/ or a new dir called
> > ${MANPATHELEMENT}/xman/ ?
>
> Following the established convention to put different format types of source
> in different directories, I would opt for the xman*
Wouldn't it be better to "fold" sman*/ and xman*/'s functionality into
the man*/ diretories and just do the lookup based on the filetype ?
[snip]
> > - Why are there no locale subdirs for the translated
> > manual pages ?
>
> I'm not sure if I understand but I think the answer is
> that there are. But they are not installed unless one
> installs them specifically. The only man pages routinly
> translated are Japanese, SUNWjaman. The listing above
> is from a system that has that package and you can see
> the locale specific directories which each have their
> own man* and sman* subdirectories.
Erm... my question was more why there are no DocBook sources installed -
I only get the troff sources for the japanese manual pages (all with the
"nice" comment at the end that they were converted by "solbook-to-man"
etc.) - IMO it would be _nice_ to skip all the troff files and just ship
the DocBook files itself for manual pages instead of creating another
conversion step (yes, I know... you need to keep the DTDs around in that
case... but IMO this "evil" is the smaller one...).
[snip]
>
> This message posted from opensolaris.org
Small request: The "Jive" forum software permamently breaks threads in
most email programs (e.g. whoever wrote this didn't seem to know about
the "In-Reply-To:"- and "References:"-headers... ;-() ... is there a way
to avoid posting via "Jive" and use normal emails, please (I assume this
thread will become huge and without threading it will be difficult to
track the postings - I am already avoiding
opensolaris-discuss at opensolaris.org because it has become almost
impossible to track the threads there since Jive messes them up... ;-( )
?
----
Bye,
Roland
--
__ . . __
(o.\ \/ /.o) roland.mainz at nrubsig.org
\__\/\/__/ MPEG specialist, C&&JAVA&&Sun&&Unix programmer
/O /==\ O\ TEL +49 641 7950090
(;O/ \/ \O;)
