Re: docbook2man patches

Subject: Re: docbook2man patches
From: Thomas Lockhart <lockhart@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 1999 06:20:39 +0000
> > Of course, everyone writes sgml source a bit differently, and I had to
> > make a few fixes to get things to work for me:

Hi Steve. I've been looking at the docbook2man script some more, and
understand more than I did when I generated patches earlier. Here are
some of the things I needed to know, and didn't, along with
suggestions on how I would like to handle them:

1) MANVOLNUM markup inside REFMETA will set the manpage section
number. I don't think that this markup is used for anything other than
manpage generation, so I would like to have a fallback of
--default-section or --section command line options to set a section
number.

2) The XREFLABEL attribute on the REFENTRY tag will set the manpage
cross-reference name. afaik this is an attribute not defined for
DocBook-3.0, though neither nsgmls not jade complains about it. This
cross-reference name is not necessarily the same as the output file
name. I would like the REFENTRYTITLE content to set the output file
name if the XREFLABEL attribute is not specified. In either case, the
cross-reference name should somehow be related to the file name of the
manpage itself, and it currently is not.

3) My earlier patches looked for an APPLICATION tag inside of the
REFENTRYTITLE block and altered the manpage section number accordingly
using the --default-app-section switch. I think that this is not
needed, and just a single --default-section would be sufficient.

4) The cross-reference database written by the SGML::Refs package
cannot be read by that package, so it is impossible to accumulate info
across invocations of your script. The code is just broken, though the
fixes are simple. I've got patches to fix it, along with fixing at
least one other typo in the Refs run-time code; any suggestions on how
to get those submitted somewhere?

I would like to start over with my patches, though some parts will
look the same as the earlier ones. Is that OK? If you already merged
some of them in then I'd be happy to make changes based on the latest
sources.

Let me know what you think. I look forward to hearing from you.
Regards.

                      - Thomas

-- 
Thomas Lockhart				lockhart@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
South Pasadena, California


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