Improving newlib's doc?
mwoehlke
mwoehlke@tibco.com
Wed Aug 16 21:41:00 GMT 2006
Jeff Johnston wrote:
> mwoehlke wrote:
>> In the mean time, would you be receptive if someone (me) took on
>> overhauling the existing documentation system? (See the thread I FW'd
>> here from cygwin-talk, "Re: What's wrong with *roff, anyway?".
>
> I don't see a posting with the subject you have quoted. Could you
> possibly resend it or refer me to the original message? I replied to
> your other question about where to update printf documentation.
Odd, gmane got it, but it does look like it got stuck there. Starting
over...
I found newlib/libc/stdio/sprintf.c, and quite frankly I am a little
surprised that this (format-wise) is all newlib has for doc; it seems
like it would be a pain to maintain (all formatting is apparently done
by hand?).
So... I was thinking about adding support for SGML documentation (or
some other format that could be easily converted to both nroff and
LaTeX/texinfo - I'm open to suggestions), and updating the makefiles
accordingly so that both manpages and info would be produced. Then I was
going to investigate "modernizing" (again, w.r.t. formatting) the doc
using the Linux glibc manpages as a starting point. My justification is
that I personally find that format much more 'readable', although so far
I've only heard my own opinion. :-)
Honestly, I'd personally prefer maintaining everything in nroff
(depending on the standards you use, converting *to* nroff can be
difficult-to-impossible), but I'm not aware of a nroff->LaTeX converter.
(At any rate, I'm not touching that doc if it has to be formatted by hand.)
For reference, here is the original thread on cygwin-talk:
http://sourceware.org/ml/cygwin-talk/2006-q3/msg00151.html
--
Matthew
"We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad... You must be, or you wouldn't
have come here." -- The Cheshire Cat
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