[tex-live] texdoc doesn't find man pages

[Werner LEMBERG]

> > I suggest that texdoc looks into the man page directories too, calling
> > `man'.
>
> By the way, I just thought this should be very easy to configure.
> Indeed, texdoc is already looking in the man page directories: it's
> just not looking for files with extension .1.

Other extensions might be possible too, for example `.5'...

> So in theory you just have to add the following lines to your
> 
> $TEXMFHOME/texdoc/texdoc.cnf
> 
> (new config file for texdoc, still undocumented):
> 
> ext_list = .pdf, .pdf.gz, .pdf.bz2, .dvi, .dvi.gz, .dvi.bz2, .ps,
> .ps.gz, .ps.bz2, .txt, .txt.gz, .txt.bz2, .html, .1
> viewer_1 = man

I don't want to do this manually.  texdoc should automatically display
man pages *which are within the distribution*.  Otherwise, similar to
the standalone `info' program, it might fire up `man' to display a
corresponding system man page (however, this is debatable and should
be configurable).

> I'll think a bit more whether this should be the default behaviour
> or not and what to do for windows users.

The probably best program to convert man pages to another high-level
format is Eric Raymond's `doclifter'.  It's small (300kByte of Python
code), and we could add it to TeXLive:

  http://www.catb.org/~esr/doclifter/

However, it converts to XML, and xmltex of TeXLive can't handle this
out of the box (I've just tried to call it, but I don't know the
details how to configure it properly).


    Werner