Tag Archives: roffit

improving the curl docs, step 1

As I mentioned before, the curl documentation needs improvement. As a first step I converted the man page for curl_easy_setopt into no less than 210(!) individual man pages. One new for each option the function supports.

The man page was originally (a few days ago) almost 3000 lines, and now with them all split up we end up with a lot more text. This because the new format encourages more text per option and each page now has to detail itself more. This should also make each option much easier to google/search and to link to when we help users understand the options.

I’ve made some server-side scripts to generate html versions of them all, I generate a list of all options we have and the examples we host on the web site now have all mentions of the options linked directly to these new pages.

The curl_easy_setopt man page will then get most explanations cut out and mainly be used as an index with the options grouped into logical sections to help users find the options they want to use. I could cut out almost 2500 lines.

The new man pages add about 7500 lines of documentation (excluding the headers in each file)…

roffit lives!

Many moons ago I created a little tool I named roffit. It is just a tiny perl script that converts a man page written in the nroff format to good-looking HTML. I should perhaps also add that I didn’t find any decent alternatives then so I wrote up my own version. I’ve been using it since in projects such as curl, c-ares and libssh2 to produce web versions of the docs.

It has just done its job and I haven’t had any needs to fiddle with it. The project page lists it as last modified in 2004, even though I actually moved it to a sourceforge CVS repo back in 2007.

Just a few days ago, I got emailed and was notified that Debian has it included as a package in the distribution and someone was annoyed on some particular flaws.

This resulted in a bunch of bugs getting submitted to the Debian bug tracker, I started up the brand new roffit-devel mailing list to easier host roffit discussions and I switched over the CVS repo to a git one on github.

If you like seeing man pages turned into web pages, consider joining up and help us improve this thing!