On 29.10.2007, at 16:37, markd@macports.org wrote:
Weissmann Markus <mww@macports.org> writes:
Also, I think the portfile.7 man page needs to be split up because it is getting so big. I propose splitting portfile.7 into four parts. What do you think?
I guess I'm open to this. I'd love to hear comment from others, however, And would there still be a portfile.7 manpage that gave general overview and gets people started?
Yes, I think there still should still be a portfile.7. I've started to split them jus tto see how it would look. It is an experiment at this point and hopefully soon I'll have something that people can look at and give judgement on.
Pretty neat! I think this is a very good idea -- especially since the XML formatting takes a lot of extra-space anyway. Good job! :)
Good to hear the idea has some support. As far as the XML formatting, it has proved to be difficult to to get man pages from them that are formatted well, and I'm not sure they are formatted all that well now. I was surprised at the difficulties we've run into, and I see why most people still use troff. But I do think that having a single source for the man pages and docs and the resulting accuracy and ease of keeping updated docs trumps any of the difficulties. That's my view anyway.
For the esthetics, perhaps we can do something like adding a command to port(1) that opens a generated html-file in a browser (via `open'), like 'port help portfile' -- or just also include a html- version of the "manpages" with port(1). -Markus -- Markus W. Weissmann http://www.mweissmann.de/