Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> So, did anyone else try to generate man pages?
Before we get too excited here: Man pages are only built/buildable from
<refentry> elements. You can't just go and convert some arbitrary section or
chapter into a man page. So there is a bit of work and invention necessary
here. Offhand I'd try writing an XSLT script that can convert the chapter to
the required refentry structure and go from there.
> I did "make man" and ran into several issues.
>
> The first is that D2MDIR needs to be specified manually. I assume this
> is how everyone does it, so I did that.
True, because there is no standard place for it. And throughout most of
history, you needed a locally built version anyway.
> The second is that the Perl script as packaged by Debian doesn't work --
> it is missing a handful of HTML entities, and it errors out before
> generating anything.
The packaging situation on Debian is quite weird. (See also
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=275715) I suggest you
download docbook2man-sgmlspl-1.0.tar.gz from upstream (docbook2x.sf.net) and
install it (configure, make, make install). Then with
make man D2MDIR=/usr/local/bin
I get plausible output. There are indeed a few entities missing, but I think
that is not really important because they appear in the areas that are not
converted to the man pages.
If there is interest in sorting out this tools mess, then I suggest also
exploring converting the entire thing to use the new XML-based docbook2x
tools.