Hello, list!
While reading the man page of MPlayer, i've noticed lots of headers of
it. That is kind of wrong. Version of MPlayer package is 
mplayer-20090708p4-sdl


With headers i mean:

The MPlayer Project         2009-03-25                          1

MPlayer(1)               The Movie Player              MPlayer(1)




-- 

Old mercenaries never die. They go to hell and regroup.

With best regards, Mikle Krutov, Bercut ltd. Technical Support department

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so, what's wrong?  mplayer doesn't update their manual?  go tell the
mplayer people; reporting that here does nothing.

-- 
jakemsr@sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org

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i think he thought the man page holds the release date of the program,
not the man page itself..

-f
-- 
excellent day to have a rotten day.

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Hi Jacob, hi Mikle,


I guess Mikle tries to say that nroff(1) splits man(7) pages
into individual pages of about 60 lines and puts a header line
and a footer line on each page, as opposed to putting one header

I don't think this feature needs fixing right now, it doesn't make
that much of a difference.  We might or might not change it later,
when we have a better control over ports manual formatting in
general.

Yours,
  Ingo

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Thank you for your explanation!

-- 

Old mercenaries never die. They go to hell and regroup.

With best regards, Mikle Krutov, Bercut ltd. Technical Support department

[ message continues ]

No. i do not mean the outdated version of manual page, but the quantity
of headers in man page. It is there almost every, hm, 20 strings or
something.

-- 

Old mercenaries never die. They go to hell and regroup.

With best regards, Mikle Krutov, Bercut ltd. Technical Support department

[ message continues ]

On all the other systems (NetBSD and FreeBSD) there is only ONE header
in mplayer manual page too, so i don't think it is mplayer issue..

-- 

Old mercenaries never die. They go to hell and regroup.

With best regards, Mikle Krutov, Bercut ltd. Technical Support department

[ message continues ]

Hi Mikle & Jan,


When wire matrix line printers were common, that was quite handy.
Modern groff (e.g. version 1.20) does not do that by default any longer.
The ancient groff (1.15) we have in the OpenBSD tree still does it.

No, talking about old groff vs. new groff vs. mandoc issues
is perfectly on topic on misc@.  These questions are currently

Right, these typically have newer groff, and will probably take
a bit longer until they delete it from their trees.

Yours,
  Ingo

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The file DOCS/man/en/mplayer.1 from
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/mplayer-export-snapshot.tar.bz2
translates into a one-header version with 'mandoc mplayer.1'
and produces the repeating headers with 'groff -man -Tascii mplayer.1'

So perhaps this is about how exactly the mplayer port builds
its manpage(s) from the mplayer.1; it doesn't: the port seems
to simply copy mplayer.1 into man/man1/mplayer.1
Then, 'man mplayer' displayes the manpage with repeated headers.

This seems to be the case with all ports I have looked at
(firefox, sox, unzip, ...); unlike the system man pages
(ls, cp, ...) which have a single header.

The difference seems to be that the system manpages are
precompiled (with mandoc) into e.g. /usr/share/man/cat1/ls.0
whereas the port manpages are just the groff sources such as
/usr/local/man/man1/mplayer.1 that get rendered online (with groff).

Perhaps (someone correct me please) man calls groff on the manpage
sources, who produces the repeating headers; but mandoc does not.

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Hi Jan,


Yes:  grep _build /etc/man.conf
And:  man man.conf

Hopefully, i will manage to switch the default man.conf from

Yes, for now.
In the future, it may happen that those manuals requiring groff
to build will be installed precompiled, too.
Such that those ports get a groff build dependency, but not a groff
run dependency.

Yes, that's what's currently happening.

Yours,
  Ingo

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