James K. Lowden wrote on Wed, Aug 07, 2013 at 00:07:08 -0400:
> I offer the above mdoc man pages to the Subversion project as a token
> of my appreciation, and in the hope they'll be included in future
> versions.
>
Thanks!
> The pages represent perhaps 30 hours of work. The --help text was
> processed through the bin/manualize Perl script to create a rough
> mdoc draft. Then individual sections were edited by hand, sometimes to
> put finishing touches on the formatting, sometimes to clarify the text.
How can we incorporate that into the dev cycle?
We don't add new command-line options between patch releases, but we may
change the help output in other, bidirectionally-compatible ways. If we
can just run 'make' to generate updated manpages, then the manpages will
always be in sync with the HEAD code; but if manual tweaks are required,
we would have to follow a scheme similar to translations: the master
English output (subversion/svn/svn.c:svn_cl__cmd_table) is updated, and
afterwards someone comes along, regenerates the manpage, re-applies the
manual edits, and commits. The problem is that a release may happen
before someone gets to update the semi-manually-generated man pages,
which will cause them to be out-of-date (with respect to 'svn help'
output) in the release.
So, in addition to Stefan's point about incorporating your man pages
into the build system, I think it'll be useful to eliminate the need for
manual steps.
Received on 2013-08-07 11:46:15 CEST