Feature proposal: New, Standard Documentation System

[Olivier Galibert]

On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 12:41:13AM -0600, Michael Cronenworth wrote:
> Before this "manpage-to-HTML" idea goes any further, I'd like to stop it.
> 
> This is not what I have envisioned. An HTML rendering engine is too 
> beefy. I'm going on previous Fedora requirements of lighter 
> documentation engines, particularly the release notes in anaconda.

If you think than groff (man), tex/makeinfo (info), docbook and their
friends are significantly lighter than an html rendering engine,
you're deluded.  Some of them only seem lighter because the files are
pre-rendered to slightly enriched text at installation time.

Now, if you'd manage to come up with a xterm/console and a graphical
tool that could find what documentation is available for a particular
command (be it man, texinfo, docbook or whatever kde, gnome, qt,
java... uses) and show it on the text or graphical interface the best
it can with unified navigation commands (including search), you would
make a lot of people happy.

But a unification of documentation formats is something that just will
not happen *even* if you make converters available.

  OG.