man2html

[Jan Stary]

Hi Craig,

> > On Jan 1, 2018, at 6:40 PM, Jan Stary <hans at stare.cz> wrote:
> > I would like to remove man2htl from macports.
> > I see that liirc (which you maintain) requires it
> > as a build dependency. Why exactly is it required please?

On Jan 01 21:00:03, ctreleaven at macports.org wrote:
> lirc provides extensive documentation in html format
> and uses man2html to produce some of it.

it seems to produce the html manpages (the API html documentation
is produced differently). For example, as there is irexec(1), i.e.
/opt/local/share/man/man1/irexec.1.gz, there is also
/opt/local/share/doc/lirc/lirc.org/html/irexec.html
- but this is what it says (viewing with lynx):

   LIRC icon LIRC logo

   Description: man2html takes formatted manpages from STDIN and converts
   it to HTML sent to STDOUT. The -topm and -botm arguments are the number
   of lines to the main body text and NOT to the running headers/footers.
   Version: 3.0.1 Copyright (C) 1995-1997 Earl Hood,
   ehood at medusa.acs.uci.edu man2html comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY and
   man2html may be copied only under the terms of the GNU General Public
   License, which may be found in the man2html distribution.

   [[1]LIRC homepage]

That's not a html version of irexec(1), that's a failed run of man2html.
Apparently, no-one hasn't looked at the html manpages; it doesn't work.

We have the original manpages in the first place;
why produce a boken html version?

Can we drop this entirely please?
I am willing to do the work (with the intent
of eventually removing man2html from the ports).

> Is there some other tool that replaces man2html that I should be using?  

There is groff -man -Thtml in the base system.
The output is not very nice, but still superior to man2html.
Try 'man2html /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1'
vs 'groff -man -Thtml /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1'
- it even lacks the NAME entry.

There is also a newer groff in ports; and there is mandoc,
whose 'mandoc -Thtml' output is way superior to them both.

But as I said, can we please drop generating the html pages entirely?

	Jan