[kde-doc-english] Documenting Commandline Applications

[Luigi Toscano]

On Friday 15 of August 2014 23:15:18 Bhaskar Kandiyal wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am a GSoC 2014 student for KDE and my project is to create a
> commandline application for managing Akonadi which is called
> 'akonadiclient'.
> Since this is a commandline application I wanted to write a man page for
> it documenting all the options and commands of the application.
> Right now my approach is to write the documentation using the
> reStructuredText markup and then converting it to the man page format
> using the rst2man tool (found in the python-docutils package in Debian /
> Ubuntu). The rst2man tool is automatically invoked by cmake when
> building the project.
> 
> Is this a good approach by KDE standards? Also, is there a standard
> approach to writing a man page for CLI applications in KDE?

Hi, the KDE documentation infrastructure is DocBook based; also manpages are 
generated from a DocBook source. The infrastructure allows for localization of 
all DocBook documents (so even localized manpages). 

We have some documentation for books, but I'm not sure it covers manpages as 
well:
http://l10n.kde.org/docs/

There are many manpages you can check and compare for reference; you can look 
for them in kdelibs and other modules, they are called man-
<something>.docbook.

I don't know about RST to DocBook converter, but I can investigate.

Feel free to ask for more details.

Ciao
-- 
Luigi