[MPlayer-dev-eng] Is anyone considering docbook for the man page ?

[Diego Biurrun]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2003 at 03:36:44PM +0100, Alban Bedel wrote:
> on Tue, 18 Mar 2003 01:34:42 +0100 you wrote:
> 
> > The man page is in for an overhaul, no question,
> > maybe even the idea of putting mplayer and mencoder together needs to
> > be revisited.  If you have any bright ideas, step forward.  In the
> > meantime I think that redundancy is our worst enemy.
> 
> I agree with you, fight the redundancy !!!!!

Yes, I'll do that, I'm working on obsoleting lavc-options.txt in this very
moment.

> I'd like to say that I would like to have (someday) a kind of integreted
> help as the man page is growing way to big now. By integrated help i mean
> the possiblity of having mplayer document it self. Something like
> 'mplayer -describe fs' would ouput what the man page is saying
> about this option. The menus could also provide that in a more
> 'interactive' way.

I had a similar idea some time ago.  The OSD menu could be a great way of
providing help.  We should at least have the default keybindings in it.

> The problem is that the man page format is not really unsuable for that.

I presume you mean "not really usable" ;)

> So what about having the man page in xml too ?

Good idea.  Let's switch the rest to XML first and see how it works out.  I
hope to finally get to this during the next days.

> Imho it would be great as it will allow many differents output formats
> wich is really nice considering the incresing number of platform supported
> by mplayer.

We can currently transform the man page to text or HTML, which are the
obvious targets for the moment but we have the problem of two different
formats between the man page and the rest of the documentation.

> I made a few search about docbook 2 man but sadly only found one tools
> wich seems good (docbook2x) but it have too much dependency imho
> (perl + several modules).

I'll have a look at it.

Diego