Re: man2html

> On Jan 2, 2018, at 1:07 PM, Alec Leamas <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Hi Jan!
> 
> On 02/01/18 11:07, Jan Stary wrote:
>> 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):'
> 
> [bad html]
> 
>> 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.
> 
> Strange thing is that by me (fedora 26, lirc devel branch) there is
> nothing wrong with irexec.html. So it seems thatl your environment is
> part of this. Fedora's man2html version is 1.6-18. What's yours?
> 
My bad there—for MacPorts, I should have used man2thml from the ‘man’ package.  I never noticed the broken pages; just that the build errors had gone away.  The packaging is now fixed.

>> We have the original manpages in the first place;
>> why produce a boken html version?
> 
> Because part of the build is to produce the  website, and the html
> manpages is an integrated part of this. We don't really have the
> manpower to rewrite all these docs :(
> 
>> Can we drop this entirely please?
> 
> So, not really...
> 
>> I am willing to do the work (with the intent
>> of eventually removing man2html from the ports).
> 
> Isn't this basically a downstream packaging issue? From upstream
> perspective: could you please file a bug, so we can handle it properly?
> (bugs are easier to track)
> 
> Note that man2html is *not* distributed with lirc it's a build dependency.
> 
> IIRC, it's possible to build without it. If not, it shouldn't be that
> hard to fix the autotools setup so it works. Looking at configure.ac the
> mechanisms to handle a missing man2html is already in place. I doubt
> it's heavily tested, but again IIRC it at least has worked at some
> point. Perhaps this is the way to handle this problem?
> 
Just using man2html from the man package fixes things sufficiently for my purposes.

A number of projects have a configure switch that enables/disables developer documentation.  Within MacPorts, we often have an install-time option to then include or exclude those docs (a “variant” in MacPorts-parlance).  Personally, I would always want the regular man pages included in the package.  Would it be a big project to make all the developer docs (including the html versions of the man pages) optional?

Craig
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