doclifter 2.9 is released
<p>I&#8217;ve released doclifter 2.9, and as part of that process I&#8217;ve been testing it on the entire collection of manual pages on my system again. Because doclifter does mechanical translation of troff-based markups to DocBook-XML, one of the side effects of testing it is that I find lots of broken markup.  I&#8217;ll ship over 700 fix patches back to maintainers this time, though maybe not until after I get back from World Boardgaming Chapionships next week. </p>
<p>Release <a href="http://www.catb.org/esr/doclifter/">here</a>, report on markup bugs found is <a href="http://www.catb.org/esr/doclifter/bugs.html">here</a>.  Yes, over 700 patches, but that&#8217;s actually a drop from previous passes.</p>
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<p>My last rampage through the man-page universe with fire and sword was in 2007.  Most (I&#8217;d say about 85%) of the patches I shipped then were accepted.  One particularly noticeable change is that in 2007, only a handful of pages identifiably had DocBook masters and could thus be skipped; in 2012 fully 7% of the entire corpus is like that.</p>
<p>Which is good news &#8211; why, at that rate, we&#8217;ll be fully converted before the end of this century. :-)</p>
<p>(For any of those who are wondering what the practical consequence is, think Web availability.  DocBook renders into HTML much more cleanly than conventional manual-page markup does.)</p>
