Man page format to Docbook XML for New Authors

[Karsten Wade]

On Wed, 2005-04-20 at 09:20 +0100, Gavin Henry wrote:
> Dear Guys,
> 
> I recently, with the help of Stefan, tagged up the whole of:
> 
> http://www.backupcentral.com/amanda.html
> 
> To give:
> 
> http://www.amanda.org/docs/using.html
> 
> 
> However, to get the manpages into docbook:
> 
> http://www.amanda.org/docs/AMANDA-manpages.html
> 
> We used Eric Raymonds Doclifter, which as you can see by the above results
> it's very good:
> 
> http://www.catb.org/~esr/doclifter/
> 
> Man page format is easy to write.

One thing we could use is an example of what a "good" or "best" man page
looks like.  We could use this as a reference for our work and for
making RFEs to developers.

Internally, we've looked in the past at converting all the man pages to
DocBook.  My biggest concern is that us writers don't want to take
responsibility for writing documentation that is really for the
developer to do.  OTOH, I don't mind being accountable for the final
product, as long as a developer is responsible for making the content
sane and match the example.

Still, TLDP is the owner of the man pages, right?  Maybe we can work out
a process and template and offer to do some of the work, but also get
TLDP to take on the new format for future work.

- Karsten
-- 
Karsten Wade, RHCE * Sr. Tech Writer * http://people.redhat.com/kwade/
gpg fingerprint:  2680 DBFD D968 3141 0115    5F1B D992 0E06 AD0E 0C41   
                       Red Hat SELinux Guide
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-4-Manual/selinux-guide/
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/docs/attachments/20050422/678157dd/attachment.bin