Package: dh-make Version: 2.202301 Severity: wishlist X-Debbugs-Cc: ius...@debian.org
A few years ago, a bug was filed against one of my packages, #956041, to report that build-depending on pandoc is a bit of a nuisance for ports architectures and bootstrapping, as it has a long depends of B-Ds itself, including the Haskell toolchain. My package was merely using pandoc to generate a manpage from a Markdown document, quite similar to dh-make's debian/manpage.md.ex template. The bug reporter's suggestion to use Build-Depends-Indep was also not a viable one, as the manpage had to be shipped with the binary itself, and a separate -doc package did not make sense for this use case. To resolve this request, I packaged "lowdown", which is a Markdown translator, including to the man format. It is a very small binary, depending only on libbsd (which is widely available). I've been maintaining it since bullseye, for a couple of years now, and upstream has been fairly responsive adding features such as Pandoc's metadata header. There are other translators such as go-md2man etc., but none as lightweight and comprehensive as lowdown, IMHO. It seems that most are not familiar with Pandoc alternatives. For example, from a recent thread on debian-devel: https://lists.debian.org/msgid-search/zswgm0nc9ax7u...@teal.hq.k1024.org I think it'd be helpful if the dh-make templates recommended lowdown in addition to, or even instead of, Pandoc. That way we'll be giving a lightweight option to fellow developers interested in writing a manpage using a modern markup language. The corresponding command-line syntax is: lowdown -s -Tman -o output.1 input.md Thanks, Faidon
