Hi Craig,

> > On Jan 1, 2018, at 6:40 PM, Jan Stary <[email protected]> wrote:
> > I would like to remove man2htl from macports.
> > I see that liirc (which you maintain) requires it
> > as a build dependency. Why exactly is it required please?

On Jan 01 21:00:03, [email protected] wrote:
> lirc provides extensive documentation in html format
> and uses man2html to produce some of it.

it seems to produce the html manpages (the API html documentation
is produced differently). For example, as there is irexec(1), i.e.
/opt/local/share/man/man1/irexec.1.gz, there is also
/opt/local/share/doc/lirc/lirc.org/html/irexec.html
- but this is what it says (viewing with lynx):

   LIRC icon LIRC logo

   Description: man2html takes formatted manpages from STDIN and converts
   it to HTML sent to STDOUT. The -topm and -botm arguments are the number
   of lines to the main body text and NOT to the running headers/footers.
   Version: 3.0.1 Copyright (C) 1995-1997 Earl Hood,
   [email protected] man2html comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY and
   man2html may be copied only under the terms of the GNU General Public
   License, which may be found in the man2html distribution.

   [[1]LIRC homepage]

That's not a html version of irexec(1), that's a failed run of man2html.
Apparently, no-one hasn't looked at the html manpages; it doesn't work.

We have the original manpages in the first place;
why produce a boken html version?

Can we drop this entirely please?
I am willing to do the work (with the intent
of eventually removing man2html from the ports).

> Is there some other tool that replaces man2html that I should be using?  

There is groff -man -Thtml in the base system.
The output is not very nice, but still superior to man2html.
Try 'man2html /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1'
vs 'groff -man -Thtml /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1'
- it even lacks the NAME entry.

There is also a newer groff in ports; and there is mandoc,
whose 'mandoc -Thtml' output is way superior to them both.

But as I said, can we please drop generating the html pages entirely?

        Jan

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