Re: portable code to generate man pages?

["J. Lewis Muir" <jlmuir%imca-cat.org@localhost>]

On 07/23, Greg Troxel wrote:
> I am part of bup upstream, which has manpage source in markdown.  The
> build uses pandoc to convert to mandoc, and also to html.
> 
> That would be fine if pandoc were written in a language that had a
> reasonable implementation, but it's the usual Haskell compiler written
> in Haskell with a complicated bootstrap story, with the result that on
> NetBSD it works on amd64 and aarch64 only.  Not even i386!
> 
> I would like to hear people's recommendation for a tool that can:
> 
>   - process easy-to-write text file to mandoc and html
>     + preference for markdown
>   - does not require anything nonportable
>     (accepting that python doesn't work on vax)
>   - is incrementally lightweight, in a build that already requires
>     python

Hi, Greg!

I haven't used it much, but you might check out lowdown, which generates
from Markdown:

  https://kristaps.bsd.lv/lowdown/

There's also Halibut, which I've used in the past to generate man (but
not mandoc) and HTML; it generates from a TeX-like format, not Markdown,
though, but I did find it to be reasonably straightforward, and I also
think the documentation is good:

  https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/halibut/

Regards,

Lewis