Re: docbook2man patches

Subject: Re: docbook2man patches
From: Thomas Lockhart <lockhart@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 17 Jul 1999 04:42:10 +0000
(sorry for cross-posting, but I wanted to catch the various doc
projects using docbook and needing man pages)

> > 3) The output file name generated from the refentry title is
> > lowercased, and has underscores to replace blanks for multi-word
> > titles. Previously, the file name was uppercased if the input string
> > was mixed case, and uppercase titles and blanks were passed through
> > unchanged. Things are still uppercased internally as you intended.
> I would prefer if upcase_names was default, since that's what most other
> things use (e.g. Data::Dumper(3pm)), and frankly that name isn't very
> intuitive -- it should be 'preserve-case'.  Is it okay for you if I make
> that change?

Sure, although historically the (pre-sgml) PostgreSQL man page files
had lower case names for SQL commands, which were written as upper
case inside the man file. Perhaps it would be OK with you if I took
your next release and made lowercase-ing an optional switch?

> > 5) The date is snarfed from <date> info in the file, if available.
> > This actually does not do anything useful for me at the moment because
> > the date isn't available early enough in the source file.
> I don't know where you put your Dates, but you can use that SGMLS::Refs
> facility to save it for the next parse.  I have always wanted to
> record revision dates on my documentation, so I'll hack it in the next
> next version.

As you may gather from my patches, I don't actually know how this
stuff works. If you are making a test file, my files happen to have
the first date field inside the refsynopsisdivinfo block (hint :) I
can send a test case if you would like.

> > btw, I haven't looked at how to get the cross reference stuff to work.
> > I'd guess that is is somewhat broken at the moment.
> If you think you broke it, it doesn't seem like it.  Works fine here.
> Otherwise, what doesn't work?

Well, I haven't tested it *at all*, but was assuming that by changing
the way file names are generated other files may have trouble
predicting the correct name of the cross reference. But perhaps that
was already handled completely enough that my hacks didn't break it.
To get the cross references to work, I need to do two passes on all of
the man page input files, right??

Thanks again. If you have a chance, perhaps you could let me know when
your next release is available (or in prerelease) and I'd be happy to
do more testing.

                      - Thomas

-- 
Thomas Lockhart				lockhart@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
South Pasadena, California


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