autogenerated man pages for newlib

Joshua Daniel Franklin joshuadfranklin@yahoo.com
Wed May 8 16:03:00 GMT 2002


Hi. I'm working on updating some of the documentation for Cygwin.
As some of you know, Cygwin uses newlib for libc and libm. Currently
there is a Cygwin package called "newlib-man" with the version as
"20001118-1" (yes, that's a date from 18 months ago). We'd like to 
do away with this package and merge the newlib documentation into the
"cygwin-doc" package. 

Now, it appears that newlib used to distribute man pages but now does
documentation in info format. So, what I have done is write a perl 
script that takes the /usr/info/lib?.info files and chops them up into
groff-formatted func.3 pages based on the node name in the info files. Nodes 
that do not describe a function are put in lib?.3 file. The output is not
perfect, but it makes passable man pages. The script also parses the "Library 
Index" node and creates a file with lines like:

cp man3/printf.3 man3/snprintf.3
cp man3/printf.3 man3/sprintf.3

That can be sourced by a shell script.

I would be happy to provide this script to the newlib project in whatever
form if newlib would like to use and support it. Otherwise I am going to put
it in the "cygwin-doc" source package as a special-purpose man page generator.
It has not been released under any licence at this point, though if I
do put it in cygwin I will GPL it. 

Thanks.
Joshua Daniel Franklin

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