To: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
From: Stuart Herbert <S DOT Herbert AT sheffield DOT ac DOT uk>
Date: 23 Mar 94 16:07:17
Subject: Re: Info port to DJGPP
Cc: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu

> Are you going to *support* (ie, maintain, bug-fix, and update
> consistently) these man pages?

I graduate soon, and job prospects in Merry England are not good these
days.  If I could guarentee net access for the next year, then I would
happily offer to support them.  I indicated that I was generating the man
pages for my own use, and would be willing to upload them somewhere if
anyone else was interested.

> If not, then they will very quickly be out of date.

The man pages are *generated* from the GNU TeXInfo stuff.  What's taking
me so long is to build the entries in the 'WhatIs Database' for them.  For
GCC alone I have over 300 separate files to index.  Then there is GAS et
al.  However, once this is done, the great overhead of the port is gone.
Next time the docs get updated, I feed them into the convertor, add entries
for new topics, and that's that.

*Real* hard work would occur if I was actually trying to improve on the
docs :)  I'm simply making them more convenient for me to use.

> Every recent GNU program comes with a warning that man pages are not to
> be relied upon and will not be supported.

But I'm not looking for someone else to support them :)  Nor am I proposing
that my efforts are made a part of the official distribution.  For that to
be feasible, *every* port of the compiler would really have to convert
over.  I have no interest in trying to change how other people work.  I'm
simply willing to make an alternative available for the current version of
GCC.

>     A better idea (not mine) would be to turn them into html docs and
> get someone to put them up on World-Wide-Web.  We'd also need to port
> a stand-alone reader so that people without WWW access could FTP the
> docs.

This may get done here at the University very soon.  Don't tell them :),
but I'm pursuing a job here which involves converting the existing online
information systems into html.  As we're introducing GCC here atm, these
docs would get put through the mill too.

Unless html becomes the original source, there's little benefit to be
gained by porting the docs that way.  The docs are merely hierarchically
structured, rather than full-blown hypertext :), and I doubt there's
anyone interested in learning TeX to improve the docs (I know I'm not.
The Uni has phased out TeX in favour of Word, which is far more
productive *imho*).  Porting the docs to html, and then modifying them
to take good advantage of that, is more than I've got time to do.

Stuart