Re: man pages for Subversion

12 aug 2013 kl. 12.38 skrev Julian Foad:

> Hi James. I have one thing to throw into the mix, which you might
> be interested in looking at. I experimented a few months ago with
> generating both the C help strings and man pages from an XML source
> file. My patch to do this is attached; it is complete and and
> usable, although not finished or quite how I would want it.

How about including the marked-up source in the svn binary (as C
constant strings) and do the rendering at run time, when the user does
"svn help"? Otherwise, it would be tricky to handle translations
properly - the translator must work on the marked-up text and it
should be possible to try out new translations without rebuilding the
binaries.

This has the extra benefit of allowing the help text to be rendered to
the width of the terminal and to (optionally) use terminal effects
such as bold and underline.

The original could either live in a separate file, as in your patch,
or as actual C constants. In any case, it probably makes things a lot
easier for the translators if the text appears as strings in the same
subversion.pot as everything else.

(Personally I would prefer something more light-weight than XML, but
perhaps it would give you an excuse to allow the --xml flag with svn
help.)
Received on 2013-08-14 20:48:31 CEST