Re: Move GNU manual pages to the Linux man-pages project

[Michael Greenberg <michael@greenberg.science>]

On 2025-09-20 at 10:31:31 PM, William Bader wrote:

[snip]
>> I guess Markdown or reStructuredText would be more friendly to new
>> contributors since many do not know Texinfo.
>
> Pandoc https://pandoc.org/ can convert between a number of formats. In
> theory, it can convert markdown and rst to texinfo. Maybe with care it
> would be possible to come up with a set of conventions for markdown,
> maybe with a preprocessing pass, to have pandoc produce texinfo that
> can print well.

I've been very happy using pandoc to generate manpages from Markdown for
ffs:

 - Markdown: <https://github.com/mgree/ffs/blob/main/docs/ffs.1.md>
 - Makefile to generate manpage: <https://github.com/mgree/ffs/blob/main/man/Makefile>
 - Output: <https://github.com/mgree/ffs/blob/main/man/ffs.1>

I haven't tried generating texinfo (I quite dislike the info reader and
avoid using it), but I suspect the output would be satisfactory. While I
understand the GNU bias in favor of info, I would support any efforts to
improve the manpages (which are, imo, more accessible).

Cheers,
Michael