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Trying to install pandoc on an x86-64 Debian stable system says:
> Need to get 15.2 MB of archives.
> After this operation, 117 MB of additional disk space will be used.
My laptop is on metered Internet nowadays and already low on
disk space, so installing pandoc is not realistic. Maybe it
wasn't realistic to other hackers with limited resources in the
past.
There's also dozens of subtly incompatible Markdown flavors out
there, most of which can't really handle manpages. Anyways,
roff isn't too bad and at least groff is well-documented.
Updating the website now requires olddoc 1.8.0 (which is much
smaller than pandoc), but I'm the only one with that burden. On
the flipside more users can update and read the manpages locally
without extra software, since nearly every developer's *nix
system has man(1) command, unlike pandoc.
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pandoc 1.8 no longer has this.
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Otherwise we end up with unreadable manpages.
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Kinda sorta works, still some Markdown => HTML formatting issues
to work out but it gives the site a reasonably consistent look.
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setup.rb users will now be able to install manpages under
man/man1 automatically, no solution for Rubygems users yet.
gzipped manpages are no longer created by default, either,
it's probably up to distros to do it.
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It may not be portable to older versions of gzip
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Only "unicorn(1)" is documented right now, but more will be
added.
Manpages are written Markdown since it's easy to write, easy to
read (in source form) and a widely-implemented format.
As of September 2009, pandoc is the only Markdown processor I
know of capable of turning Markdown into manpages. So despite
adding a dependency on Haskell (not yet very common these days)
for documentation, the features and performance of
pandoc+Markdown outweigh the drawbacks compared to other
lightweight markup systems.
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