Bug#843207: ITP: man2texi -- man page to texinfo file converter
Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
Owner: "Paul Hardy" <unifoundry@unifoundry.com>
Version: 0.02
Upstream Author: Nelson Beebe
URL: http://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/man2texi/
License: GPL2+, GFDL1.3+
Programming Lang: Bourne shell, awk, sed
Description: man page to texinfo file converter
Debian packages require man pages, GNU packages require texinfo files,
and never the twain shall meet...until now. The man2texi package can
convert single man pages to texinfo files, or convert multiple man
pages to texinfo files in a batch mode.
The upstream author, Professor Nelson Beebe of the University of Utah,
is very active in the TeX and GNU communities. He wrote an earlier
version of this converter, man2texi version 0.01, over a decade ago.
Someone else with the GNU Project and I have further modified that
package. I am working in cooperation with Professor Beebe to produce
a version 0.02 with these modifications. We expect this to be done
shortly. "When it is ready" (to coin a phrase), I intend to package
it for Debian.
The package consists mainly of: a Bourne-type shell script (which will
be installed as /usr/bin/man2texi), an awk script and a sed script
that will be installed in /usr/share/man2texi/, and a man2texi.1.gz
man page.
Although the version number is low, this package performs a batch
conversion on all of the man pages in my Unifont package with one
command, producing perfect texinfo output.
The GNU (and Debian) autogen package already has a file named
man2texi, but it is buried in the autogen directory and will not cause
any conflict. It does not have a man page either, so there will be no
conflict with the man2texi man page. I have been in contact with the
Debian Developer who maintains autogen, Andreas Metzler, about this.
There is one usage quirk with this package: the sed script will
convert man pages containing ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1) characters, not
UTF-8 characters. Because of this, I run the command by setting
"LC_ALL=C". I do not think this is a show stopper, as this
environment variable can be set on a command line in a Makefile, and
this usage is documented in the man2texi man page.
The package is small and simple, so it should not take long to review
once ready. I am hoping to get it into Testing before the upcoming
freeze.
Paul Hardy
GNU Unifont Maintainer
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