Docbook to Man pages

[Bhuvaneswaran]

Hello,

I have been looking around for a best way to prepare man pages out of
our existing documents. Atleast, right now we have an immediate need
to prepare the man page(s) for the server guide. It really makes sense
to include the man pages when the user won't install any desktop when
he uses the Ubuntu system as a server.

The stylesheet is available to convert the document in docbook format
to a man page. We can make use of this stylesheet to generate man
pages for the server guide. When we generate the man pages using this
method, it'd be very easy to maintain appropriate docbook document.
The stylesheet is depend of couple of tags to generate man pages. They
are, refentry, refmeta, refentrytitle, refsect1, etc.

So, it implies we must maintain a seperate set of xml files to
generate man pages and make changes related to the above mentioned
tags. I wish to get your concurrence before i can create seperate
directory (sg-man-pages?) for these set of xml files.

We have two ways to go from here:

1) Merge all existing server guide xml files (chapters) to single file
with single refentry tag, thus, just one man page is generated. The
user can use this man page as one-stop guide to install all his server
applications

2) Retain all existing server guide xml files (chapters) as they are
right now. But, make changes in them to include necessary ref* tags.
In this method, seperate man page is generated for each chapter. We
may have one master man page listing the details of man pages of all
chapters and instructing the user to refer the relevant man page for
further details.

You can suggest a best way to go from here. Your comments are welcome.
-- 
Regards,
Bhuvaneswaran
www.symonds.net/~bhuvan/
GPG: 0x7A13E5B0