Jan Wieck wrote:

> On 5/30/2005 8:19 PM, Neil Conway wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 2005-05-30 at 14:26 -0400, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
>>
>>> Well, it _is_ a source package.  I don't think we should be shipping
>>> pre-built things with it.
>>
>>
>> This philosophy would suggest shipping `configure.ac', and expecting
>> people to run "autoconf" for themselves :)
>>
>> It is common practice to ship pregenerated files with source tarballs;
>> we do it in the Postgres release tarballs for yacc and lex files, as
>> well as the SGML docs.
>
>
> It is common practice for things that require not-so-standard tools or
> specific versions of those tools. DocBook and the likes are IMHO good
> candidates to fall into that category.

man pages seem to fall into an entertaining corner of the category.

With a fair bit of hacking around, I have been able to get the
slon/slonik as well as slonik command reference to transform into a set
of man pages.  Unfortunately, the ability to do so seems to fall into
the category of "really highly fragile."

I'm NOT going to try very hard to have man pages deployed in 1.1, but
they certainly will be possible eventually.

I'm personally inclined to deploy a "docs tarball" separate from the
sources; the overall point of the exercise is, of course, to make it as
easy as possible for people to get at the documentation.