[csw-maintainers] /testing spamassassin, bind, dhcp, dnstop

[Sebastian Kayser]

Peter Bonivart wrote on 16.02.2010 09:53:
> On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 9:33 AM, Dagobert Michelsen <dam at opencsw.org> wrote:
>>> Or can we convert from HTML to man page format in any simple way?
>> At least I don't know a solution with reasonable results.
> 
> It's a pretty short and simple man page. I know POD and there's
> pod2man to convert. I may go that way (to avoid learning new stuff
> ;-).

James helped out to dig deeper into what exactly is going on here (I
faced a similar problem with autossh). The root cause as well as a
possible workaround are described in [1].

In short:

* man page is written with roff macros from the doc macro package
  (grog(1) can help to determine this), thus formatting it with the
  an/man macro package - which is what man does by default - fails.

* "groff -m doc -Tascii -P-cuob <manpage>" can be used to produce a
  pre-formatted man page which can then be placed in
  /opt/csw/share/man/catman<section> from where it will simply be read
  instead of being run through the roff chain.

The second step is my simplistic approach after reading into the basics
of roff a bit, so there might be very well a "better" approach ... but
again, it does the job (and even better than the ugly workaround posted
earlier).

There is also some background on man vs. doc macro packages geared
towards man page writers at [2]. Quote: "do yourself a favor: use
tmac.an -- use of any other macro package is considered harmful."

HTH

Sebastian

[1] http://www.opencsw.org/mantis/view.php?id=4280
[2] http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Man-Page/q5.html