Re: [Exim] Why no man pages for Exim on FreeBSD?

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Author: Nigel Metheringham
Date:  
To: Philip Hazel
CC: Juha Saarinen, Sheldon Hearn, Tabor J. Wells, exim-users@exim.org
Subject: Re: [Exim] Why no man pages for Exim on FreeBSD?
On 04 Jul 2001 09:57:51 +0100, Philip Hazel wrote:
> I am not prepared to maintain both the comprehensive reference manual,
> AND separate man pages containing the same information. Also, I cannot
> see any easy way of automatically generating man pages from the manual.
> And how would you split up the manual into man pages? One per chapter?
> In that case, why not just use the HTML format? It has an index and
> table of contents, which are necessary adjuncts to a document of that
> size.


A man page is useful for command
line options and the like, and for
giving you a pointer where the real
documentation lies - the exim man
pages around all appear to come from
the pages that debian produced, and
apart from locations of config files
should be generic to pretty much all
Unix installs. [Or do the *BSDs use
a different set of roff macros?]

Command line options pretty much
never change now - nothing like the
more detailed documentation needs
to.

Why not take the current debian man
page (presumably its GPL so license
compatible), replace any file path
references with some tags and then
run it through the same sort of
process as the rest of the exim
build to give a man page that is
reasonably accurate for the system
you have.

Want me to give that a go in my
copious spare time?

    Nigel.
--
[ Nigel Metheringham           Nigel.Metheringham@??? ]
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