Re: [PATCH] manpages for everything

[Jordi Mallach]

On Sat, Feb 09, 2008 at 11:30:42AM +0100, Robert Millan wrote:
> >   desc=`$prefix/bin/$program --help | sed -n '2s/.*-- //p'`
> >   $help2man -N -i debian/mangen.inc -s 1 -S FSF -n "$desc" 
> > $prefix/bin/$program >$program.1
> Do we need $desc/-n ?  It looks like a workaround for a limitation in help2man
> (or for some oddness in mailutils output).

If I remember correctly, the default description in help2man manpages is
a generic one, not useful at all.

readmsg --help gives me:
address@hidden:~$ readmsg --help
Forma d'ús: readmsg [OPCIÓ...]
GNU readmsg -- mostra missatges

I extract the "show messages part" from this and use it as the
description.

I now found a bug report: #368628. In short, I think we need this here
too.

> Btw, what will we need when we support l10n in those utils' --help output?  
> LANG=C
> for English manpages, plus some logic to enable each other supported 
> language?  Do
> we have to take something into account right now?

Not for now. When we do have utils translations, the tricky part will be
assuring the --help output is translated, or it'll be of little use, or
will be half in English, half translated, etc. So we'd have to make some
kind of rule, like "only generate l10n'd manpages if the po is up to
date and 100% translated".

This, if we want to go with autogenerated manpages forever. If we'd use
the autogenerated manpages as a base for manually maintained manpages,
then we would use "po4a" to maintain translations of the original
documents.

Jordi
-- 
Jordi Mallach Pérez  --  Debian developer     http://www.debian.org/
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