NewHelpSystem & man pages

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Apr 14, 2009, at 15:52, Rainer Müller wrote:

> I made a call for contributions on macports-users before about writing
> more helpful strings for the current implementation, but nobody  
> seems to
> be interested. So why should I not be allowed to do something about it
> if nobody else cares? And as it is me doing the work, I am going to do
> it in a way I like.

I admit I don't remember this prior message, but there are so many  
messages, it's easy to forget some. I do remember a prior discussion  
advocating a switch from the Guide's docbook to asciidoc, and though  
we haven't done so yet, my recollection of the outcome of that  
discussion was that asciidoc should allow the same output to be  
produced, while allowing the source documents to be more readable.  
Rainer, I'm glad you're trying it out, and I'll be interested to see  
what comes of your efforts. Though your primary focus is  
documentation for the command line, I agree with Mark on the  
necessity of having this documentation available on the web as well,  
e.g. as an appendix to the guide, so I hope we'll be able to see the  
HTML output of your documents at some point to see how they'll fit  
in. As you work with asciidoc, it would be great if you could let us  
know about things you've learned about asciidoc, both the good and  
the bad.


I had forgotten we even had "port help". It would be great to reduce  
the number of places where we have unique documentation (so it's  
easier to update, so it's more likely it will get updated). So making  
"port help" use manpages sounds like a fine idea to me.