Re: New docbook2man-spec.pl patches

Ack! I slightly broke the cross reference section numbers in my last
set of cleanups (so they came out empty). Here is a revised patch;
sorry for the duplication...

- Thomas

> I've been working some more on the perl-based man page utility at
>
> http://shell.ipoline.com/~elmert/hacks/docbook2X/
>
> Here are some patches (on the 1.17 release, the latest) which
> incorporate the following changes:
>
> o ID attributes on REFENTRY and REFENTRYTITLE are used to develop
> cross reference information, as Norm Walsh indicated he would expect
> the behavior to be. The original XREFLABEL functionality is also
> supported, so either style will work.
>
> o The section number for the man page output is determined in a
> subroutine ManPageSect(), since it is called from several places.
>
> o The output file name and citation name are determined in a
> subroutine FileInfo(), again since it is called from several places.
>
> o A new switch, --blockformat, is defined to specify that the SYNOPSIS
> should not be folded into a single line, but rather kept as a verbatim
> block. This behavior was already invoked if one had explicitly coded
> FORMAT attributes into the SYNOPSIS header, but now you don't have to
> do that if you specify the switch.
>
> o Cross references are resolved using both the LINKEND and ENDTERM
> attributes on the XREF tag. ENDTERM takes precedence, as in Norm's
> style sheets.
>
> o manpage.log is written to show changes to the cross-reference
> database. We might want to make this an option.
>
> o perldoc info has been updated to show command line options.
>
> o My last patches played around with trying to automatically determine
> the appropriate man page section number by looking for an APPLICATION
> tag in the REFENTRYNAME block. I've simplified the options, making it
> easier to just specify which section the doc should be in. The code
> still looks for the APPLICATION tag per Steve's fixes on my patches,
> but there may need to be another patch to get the options and code
> just right.
>
> This utility now produces man pages from PostgreSQL sgml docs of
> sufficient quality to replace our old hand-written pages (once I
> understand more about nsgmls; will ask on a separate thread).

--
Thomas Lockhart lockhart(at)alumni(dot)caltech(dot)edu
South Pasadena, California