man pages screwed

[Mark D. Roth]

On Mon Apr 16 02:44 2001 -0400, Jim Knoble wrote:
> Hmm ... wouldn't it be better to actually detect whether the -mdoc
> macros were available rather than defaulting to -man for non-BSD
> systems?  Most releases of GNU groff have pretty good -mdoc macros and

I thought of this as well, but I wasn't sure how portable it was to
some of the more esoteric systems which I don't have access to.
There's also the problem of avoiding mis-detection; even if groff is
installed, the man command on many systems will only invoke the vendor
version.

In general, I do prefer manual testing to hard-coded assumptions when
it comes to autoconf.  However, the OpenSSH configure.in already has a
lot of hard-coded assumptions for many platforms, so that battle has
already been lost.  Also, I wasn't too worried about the wrong choice
being made, since the --with-mantype option allows the user to
manually force the desired behavior.

Anyway, if you'd like to take a stab at this nroff test, please feel
free to do so.  If it can be done in a reliable way, I'm all for it.


> can handle the OpenSSH man pages with no problem.  I think pages
> formatted with -mdoc look better and are easier to read than those
> formatted with -man (no reflection on you or on mdoc2man.pl, Mark).

Heh, no problem.  It happens that I also like -mdoc pages better,
since the format lends itself to translation to HTML and other formats
much more easily.  Unfortunately, -man is more portable.

-- 
Mark D. Roth <roth at feep.net>
http://www.feep.net/~roth/