Ingo Schwarze <schwa...@usta.de> wrote: |Tadziu Hoffmann wrote on Tue, Aug 23, 2016 at 01:29:07AM +0200:
.. |> And regarding the |> "ready-to-use solution" that has "long been available": |> for the most part, the semantic information is simply not |> encoded in the manpages. | |That is true for the Linux manpages project, which still uses the |man(7) language for manual pages, and for some other projects, in |particular GNU software, as far as that uses manual pages at all. |For BSD software, that statement has no longer been true since the |switch of almost all manpages to mdoc(7) 25 years ago, and various |other projects also use mdoc(7). That is plain untrue unless all you look at is the .Nm and some rare other constructs, which is not sufficient for a whole lot of manuals, if not the majority of them. And those are mostly completely meaningless inside of large documents like the manuals of bash (man), mksh (mdoc) etc. .. |> Ultimately, they're intended to be read by humans, and if |> humans understand them their purpose has been achieved. | |Very true. In addition to that, and less importantly, semantic |searching is at times useful. And *if* people want semantic markup |(which started this thread), they can have it (of course, as you |say, only for those manuals that contain semantic markup in the |first place). No. If you don't know where the root of something is, you can only provide a list of occurrences of that something. That improves searching, but that is all there is about it. If you have a book of only 200 pages and you have several dozen occurrances of a correctly marked .Va, then be lucky that you are in less(1) and not in a paperback. In an index list of several dozen places, your concept misses the single bold entry. I am still dreaming, and it is possible that you could have a real handbook of all the installed software of your box, automatically created and semantically correct, with index and toc. mandoc -Thtml /usr/share/doc/man* is a great thing, and it is quite fast, but it won't give you that result. --steffen
