Cygwin manpages clobbered

[Warren Young]

On 5/9/2013 13:37, Lavrentiev, Anton (NIH/NLM/NCBI) [C] wrote:
>
> I'm using stock Cygwin 1.7.18-1, and tried to read manpages about Cygwin
> path conversion routines, cygwin_conv_path() et al.  The output does not
> appear formatted properly,

This appears to be a very old problem.

Here's what I know so far, after some time spent looking into it:

0. You're talking about /usr/share/man/man3/cygwin_conv_path.3.gz, which 
was probably generated from winsup/cygwin/path.sgml in the Cygwin source 
tree through a processing chain that remains obscure to me.

1. That file comes from the cygwin-doc package, which was last built 
about three years ago.  Further, the source file in question hasn't been 
touched since December 2009.

2. If you zless the raw man page file, you can see that the problem is 
in the generated file.  That rules out the other pieces in the chain 
between raw bits on the disk and your eyes: mintty, groff, $PAGER, etc.

There's rumblings from the powers that be that such documentation might 
be generated differently soon, so we're at a good point to talk about 
fixing this.

While you wait for those of us in charge of the docs to figure out how 
we want to proceed, I suggest you use the web version.  That function's 
documented here: http://cygwin.com/cygwin-api/func-cygwin-conv-path.html

As you can see, the web and man pages look to have come from the same 
source; they differ almost entirely in formatting.  I did see *one* 
content difference.  My guess is that this is because the cygwin-doc 
package was generated from output files generated before April 2010, 
whereas the web pages get rebuilt much more often.

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