Re: [help-texinfo] Texinfo <-> roff?

[Karl Berry]

Hi James,

    document the command-line options in just one
    place, and perform some kind of conversion.

All IMHO ...

1) FWIW, https://www.gnu.org/software/autogen/ (search for autoopts)
was Bruce Korb's attempt to fully centralize option processing.
More than just the doc. I confess I've never attempted to use it.

2) Assuming you don't just want to use the mentioned help2man for the
man pages and avoid the problem entirely ...

3) What comes to my mind is to put the option doc in a separate file and
write your own converter in your favorite language.  And such a tool,
once written, could be further developed, distributed in Texinfo, etc.

Even given a texi-to-man (none exists) or man-to-texi tool (Nelson Beebe
has one with an upcoming release, as Gavin mentioned), such tools will
inevitably be about translating entire documents, which would not be
helpful for an option list fragment.  Similarly for going through or
starting from another format (pod, markdown, etc.), Docbook most of
all. What's needed is just a string-to-string conversion.

As for the direction, FWIW I think it makes more sense to go from
texinfo->man (your preference anyway, yay :), since the texi source will
have index entries, among other things, which will have no counterpart
in the man page. I don't think the reverse is true. Still, there
could/should be severe restrictions on the Texinfo end to make the
conversion manageable, since option lists don't need much markup.

    http://texinfo.org/texi2roff/ 

I changed the link to http://mirror.ctan.org/support/texi2roff/,
but this program is not maintained and not useful,
as far as I can see.

    redirects to www3.texinfo.org, which domain ...

Yes, I gave up the texinfo.org domain a few years ago. I didn't see it
elsewhere on the gnu.org/s/texinfo page, though I suspect some of the
other links there have become stale.

best,
karl