on glibc forking/reclaiming its man pages (was: on the irresponsibility of pursuing C language reform)

[Joseph Myers]

On Mon, 3 Aug 2026, G. Branden Robinson wrote:

> On the bright side, I wager that a domain-specific translator to get
> from a specific Texinfo manual--likely one that imposed special rules on
> its maintainers to enable extraction of data necessary for man page
> production--could be written.  The job will demand someone with solid
> domain expertise in both formats.  Better, such people actually exist.

We do in fact have such translation for GCC and binutils; parts of the 
Texinfo manuals are marked up for extraction with a script texi2pod.pl 
with the results then going through pod2man (as shipped with perl).  
(Being intended for converting instructions for invoking a command-line 
program, rather than documentation for library functions, no doubt 
significant changes would be needed to be useful for glibc; also, the 
glibc manual documents lots of things outside of the individual function 
descriptions, and that information wouldn't end up in such generated man 
pages because it's not suitably structured to put in them.)

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
josmyers@redhat.com