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Date: Sat, 9 Nov 2002 13:43:52 -0500 (Est)
From: Joshua Slive <joshua@slive.ca>
To: dev@httpd.apache.org,  <docs@httpd.apache.org>
Subject: nroff man pages going away
Message-ID: <Pine.WNT.4.44.0211091333510.1476-100000@Poste3947>
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[X-posted to dev because I don't want anybody being surprised by the
disappearance of man pages and having a fit about it.]

Question: How important is it that we distribute nroff man pages?

At the moment there is nobody updating the man pages because nobody feels
like playing with nroff.  Even if they do get updated, it is difficult to
transform the nroff into a format that works well in the manual.  So the
choices are:

1. Just ditch the nroff and covert to xml like the rest of the docs; stop
distributing independent man pages.

2. Leave in nroff, hope that somebody decides to update them and that we
can figure out a decent way to convert to xml/html for the manual.

3. Convert to xml, and find a way to generate nroff from the xml so that
we can continue to distribute man pages.

I believe that 2 is not a solution, since nobody has been willing to touch
the nroff pages in a long time.  They are getting more and more out of
date.  The best solution would be 3, but that would be quite a chunk of
work.  So unless somebody comes up with a better solution, I will be
removing the nroff man pages and replacing them with xml.

Joshua.


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