Manpages for scripts

[ghisvail]

Traditionally, all Unix programs are documented with manual pages and Linux distribution often recommends providing corresponding manpages for each installed command-line utility.

It would be nice to improve the prov package so it generates the respective manpage for each script. For instance, this could be achieved by integration of a pair of custom build and install setuptools commands responsible for calling help2man on the scripts.

Cheers,

[trungdong]

Hi @ghisvail,

Thank you for the pointer. I'll have a look into this, but I have to admit that it's not high on my list. As I don't have a Linux background, I almost never thought of manpages. It will probably take me a bit of time to know my ways around them.

[ghisvail]

A modern approach is to write them in Markdown and use pandoc for conversion to the manpage format. See the following blog post for an example.