I’ve released doclifter 2.9, and as part of that process I’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’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.
Release here, report on markup bugs found is here. Yes, over 700 patches, but that’s actually a drop from previous passes.
My last rampage through the man-page universe with fire and sword was in 2007. Most (I’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.
Which is good news – why, at that rate, we’ll be fully converted before the end of this century. :-)
(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.)