Bug#175770: dpkg-dev: dpkg-scansources man page "prog"

[Martin Quinson <Martin.Quinson@tuxfamily.org>]

On Fri, Jan 17, 2003 at 12:01:08PM +0100, Wichert Akkerman wrote:
> Previously Martin Quinson wrote:
> > I think that putting the documentation along the code is the a very good
> > solution to get developpers documenting their changes.
> 
> The problem here is CVS, which has a broken idea that a commit can not
> span multiple files.
> 
> Also note that we are slowly moving to switching to docbook
> documentation for everything in dpkg, including manpages.

AFAIK, you're moving to DocBook sgml, not xml. At least, that's what you did
put in the cvs...
A long time ago I did ask you to move to xml, to be able to use poxml, but I
tested this tool a bit more, and my experiments leaded me to develop po4a...

> >   We are thinking about other modules, like wml (web meta language),
> >   texinfo, XML, HTML and others.
> 
> gettext for XML already exists, and I would like to use that instead..

You're speaking about poxml, I guess. It has several limitation over po4a.
For example, the way translators can add a section in the translation to
explain who did the translation, and where to repport bugs isn't very
natural.
Other point, lists are a real pain to translate with poxml.

And of course, poxml can't handle sgml, and will never ;)

> > So, translating pod documentation is as easy as translating man pages (or
> > even easier), and pod is far simpler to write for programmers, which is
> > another argument for saying that pod documentation is potentially better
> > maintained...
> 
> docbook is just as easy. The whole issue is somewhat moot since all perl
> will disappear from dpkg anyway :)

Yes, but in the meanwhile, you could close this bug by applying the oneliner
patch I provided... But as always, you're the boss here.

Thanks, Mt.

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