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1. muesli (fribbledom@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 09-Jan-2022 14:13:12 UTC muesli

   I'm not quite sure why we still haven't switched to using markdown for man pages.

   Insisting on GNU Troff is just messy and futile at this point. It's almost as if they don't want people to easily generate documentation for their projects 🤔

   • Siilwyn (siilwyn@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 09-Jan-2022 14:26:45 UTC Siilwyn

     in reply to

     • muesli

     @fribbledom most devs I know never use man pages. Think mainly since all decent CLI tools have a help command/flag.

   • Zeer0xeeR0x (0x0x@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 09-Jan-2022 14:29:53 UTC Zeer0xeeR0x

     in reply to

     • muesli

     @fribbledom There are certainly converters out there. And I suppose one could submit a patch to "man" to allow it to render and index markdown files.
     I think the GNU project essentially tried to replace "man" with "info", albeit with limited success. "man" itself is rather klunky in other ways (mainly its lack of hyperlinks). I think it remains ubiquitous only because distros (specifically Debian) require it.

   • paolog@mastodon.social's status on Sunday, 09-Jan-2022 14:32:03 UTC paolog

     in reply to

     • muesli

     @fribbledom you can use this tool to generate troff from markdown https://github.com/kapouer/marked-man

   • Chuso Pérez (chuso@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 09-Jan-2022 14:45:06 UTC Chuso Pérez

     in reply to

     • muesli

     @fribbledom Like still using TeX for info pages.
     Although... does anyone actually use info?

   • Julian Andres Klode 🏳️‍🌈 (juliank@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 09-Jan-2022 15:36:49 UTC Julian Andres Klode 🏳️‍🌈

     in reply to

     • muesli

     @fribbledom Looking at this in APT, the existing markdown 2 roff I was not happy with and the translation story neither - no po4a support for markdown.

   • Daniel Cassidy 🦌 (danielcassidy@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 09-Jan-2022 17:32:50 UTC Daniel Cassidy 🦌

     in reply to

     • muesli

     @fribbledom GNU don't want anyone to be able to easily do anything, that's my they invented Autotools and Emacs.

   • muesli (fribbledom@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 10-Jan-2022 10:36:28 UTC muesli

     in reply to

     • bee :xmpp: :artix: :monero:

     @neXtTech

     Styling options aren't what this is about: they exist in roff just as well.

     This is about generating and writing man pages in a format that people actually like to use. Which is something nobody has ever said about roff, not even its creators.

     There's a reason why all these man pages are horrible to read and parse, not regularly updated, or worse, simply missing.

   • bee :xmpp: :artix: :monero: (nexttech@nerdculture.de)'s status on Monday, 10-Jan-2022 10:36:34 UTC bee :xmpp: :artix: :monero:

     in reply to

     • muesli

     @fribbledom What would switching to markdown do? Is bold and italics really needed to explain a command?