beeware
Actual man pages
What is the problem or limitation you are having?
Can't actually write man pages
Describe the solution you'd like
Take in troff, ship man page
Describe alternatives you've considered
- Make a wrapping script that temporarily overrides the long description
- Run a side process that watches for briefcase to write out the man page and rewrite it
- Munge the resulting packages to insert the correct man page
Additional context
This was discussed in discord
Sounds like a reasonable suggestion. The man page template generated by Briefcase gets the job done in terms of providing a man file, but it's clearly inadequate a full documentation.
The long description text also needs to be usable for other purposes (such as various parts of the RPM/DEB package building process), so adding troff markup to long_description won't really be viable. Adding troff content to pyproject.toml also sounds like a recipe for an unwieldy pyproject.toml file.
My suggestion here would be to provide a complete override for man page handling. The template produces app name.1 based on formal name, long description etc. However, we could allow a user to define:
man_page = "path/to/manpage.1"
which provides a full manpage file in troff format. If man_page isn't defined, the templated file is left as-is; but if it is specified, the file can be copied into the app as a complete replacement for the templated manfile as part of the app resources step.
@aviralgarg05 If you want to try your hand at fixing this, go right ahead. We don't formally assign issues to users; we'll consider any PR that implements the feature as described.
@aviralgarg05: are you is still working on this? Even if your work is incomplete, it might be worth posting it as a draft PR so others can use it as a starting point.
