[gnutls-devel] GnuTLS | tools in src/ should not use libopts for parsing cmd line options (#775)

[Development of GNU's TLS library]

Tim Rühsen 🛠 @rockdaboot wrote
[...]
> Do you know of alternatives?

No, I had searched in vain multiple times. I have found myriads of C option parsing libraries, but many are orphaned and none of the ones I looked offered the autogeneration of docs as autogen did. (A typical example is gengetopt: It can produce manpages, but they are very bare-bone, and it is also dead upstream.)

>  When adding/changing command line options within the C sources, the man pages and texinfo file should automatically be updated.
> 
> This MR does it the following way:
> 
>     build the tool
>     execute the tool with a special option
>     inject the output from the tool into a markdown template
>     use pandoc to generate manpage and texinfo from the resulting markdown file
> 
> The workflow allows the developer to just work on the C code (adding an array entry and doing the implementation). No manual editing of texinfo, no out-of-sync of implementation and documentation ever again.

That sounds very sensible and similar to the current solution. Thank you! (FWIW I think that moving away from autogen is something that will need to happen at some point, since it is a single-author project and upstream activity is declining.)

Regarding markdown to man and/or texinfo converters: The alternatives are rare. ronn needs ruby and only does manpage output. lunamark (lua) might have been a candidate, but it is not even packaged for Debian.

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