Re: netpbm: "Super Stable" -> "Advanced" -- please test

[Thomas Klausner <wiz%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

On Wed, Sep 03, 2014 at 11:12:54AM +0200, is%netbsd.org@localhost wrote:
> Are we creating the real man pages nowadays, or installing the
> go-read-the-html-online template like we used to do until pkgsrc-2014q2
> at least?

Ah, that was the point of the question, that they are useless.

They still are.

Here's what the script creating them says:

--- begin quote ---
#############################################################################
#                               makepointerman
#############################################################################
#
# This program creates a Netpbm man page that says nothing except to use a
# web browser to look at a particular URL.
#
# In Netpbm, we believe that man pages, and the Nroff/Troff formats, are
# obsolete; that HTML and web browsers and the world wide web long ago replaced
# them as the best way to deliver documentation.  However, documentation is
# useless when people don't know where it is.  People are very accustomed to
# typing "man" to get information on a Unix program or library or file type,
# so in the standard Netpbm installation, we install a conventional man page
# for every command, library, and file type, but all it says is to use your
# web browser to look at the real documentation.

# What would be ideal is if the user simply had Manweb (or something like
# it) installed as the 'man' command and configured to find the Netpbm
# web documentation.

# But because of the high probability that Netpbm installers will not
# install Manweb, pointer man pages are necessary.

# Besides making the web documentation accessible, pointer man pages serve
# another important purpose:  Installing them causes obsolete man pages from
# before web documentation existed to be discarded.
--- end quote ---


Which makes this part of the man page contents a bit annoying to read
to me:


--- begin quote ---
Note that making the documentation available this way was
a choice of the person who installed Netpbm on this system.
It is also possible to install Netpbm such that you would
simply see the documentation instead of the message you are
reading now.
--- end quote ---

It seems we need html2mdoc :)

 Thomas