Re: Mandoc for oil

[Jan Stary <hans@stare.cz>]

On Jun 14 05:24:23, matt.singletary@gmail.com wrote:
>   I was concerned that if I wrote osh.1 in mdoc(7), I would need to
> generate another man(7) page for systems that don't support mdoc(7), ie
> most linuxes.

Linux systems do "support" mdoc(7): the linux man(1) runs groff(1)
to format the manpage, and groff(1) understands both mdoc(7) and man(7).

> But isn't the point of mandoc -T man to output man(7) from an
> mdoc(7) file?

No. An mdoc(7) manpage can be readily displayed
(by mandoc, by groff, by the linux man via groff).
Just like a man(7) page can.

>   Or asking another way; what's the most reasonable (workflow) way to write
> a man page in mdoc(7),

$ vi prog.1
$ vi function.3
$ vi format.5

> but make man pages available on systems that don't
> support mdoc(7) (ie most linuxes)?

They do, see above.

mdoc(7) is not a novelty, it has been around for decades.
See the excelent https://manpages.bsd.lv/history.html
(which is interesting in itself).

	Jan

> > > A good start is
> > >
> > >       $ wc -l /usr/share/man/man1/*.1 | sort -n | less
> > >
> > > (or wherever your system keeps manpages),
> > > pick the shortest one for a program you know and use,
> > > and read the (input) manpage, such as
> > >
> > >       $ vim /usr/share/man/man1/yes.1
> >
> > I forgot an important thing: on many systems outside of the *BSD family,
> > the system manpages will be written in the legacy man(7) format,
> > built on top of roff(7), a general purpose typesetting language.
> >
> > Both man(1) and mandoc(1) can read both; but mdoc(5) ficilitates
> > semantic markup ("this is a commandline option"), as opposed to
> > low-level formating instructions ("type this in italic").
> >
> > In case your system uses man(7), not mdoc(7), as e.g. most linuxes do,
> > you will have to learn mdoc elsewhere, e.g.
> >
> >         http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/usr.bin/yes/yes.1

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