[distcc] Improving the man pages

[Daniel Hartwig]

Hello

Attached is a first pass at improving the source of distcc(1). At this
point I am only addressing typographical and syntax issues, such as "-"
vs. "\-" [1], preventing inappropriate hyphenation, consistent
formatting and use of man page conventions, and general readability of
the source.

There are a couple of TODO markers still, and I will make a final pass
to fully apply conventions such as command names in bold and program
suites in italics (underline).

After that I will perform similar work on the other man pages.

I have only tested the result on Debian Sid which is GNU troff 1.22.2.
Feedback as to whether it renders correctly on other systems is
appreciated.


Also, these files do not contain any Copyright notice or license notice.
It is practical to include a source comment at the top like this:

.ig
Copyright (C) AUTHOR

LICENCE BOILERPLATE
..

which I will do, but am not sure about the intended license. It seems
that these files _may_ have been produced from an earlier SGML version
which was GNU Free Documentation License. Is that the preferred license
for the man pages?

Regards

[Martin Pool]

Post by Daniel Hartwig
Hello
Attached is a first pass at improving the source of distcc(1). At this
point I am only addressing typographical and syntax issues, such as "-"
vs. "\-" [1], preventing inappropriate hyphenation, consistent
formatting and use of man page conventions, and general readability of
the source.

Hello Daniel, thank you for improving this.

That looks fine when I skim through the output and diff.

There are a couple of TODO markers still, and I will make a final pass

Post by Daniel Hartwig
to fully apply conventions such as command names in bold and program
suites in italics (underline).

Let me know when it's ready to merge.

Post by Daniel Hartwig
After that I will perform similar work on the other man pages.
I have only tested the result on Debian Sid which is GNU troff 1.22.2.
Feedback as to whether it renders correctly on other systems is
appreciated.
Also, these files do not contain any Copyright notice or license notice.
.ig
Copyright (C) AUTHOR
LICENCE BOILERPLATE
..
which I will do, but am not sure about the intended license. It seems
that these files _may_ have been produced from an earlier SGML version
which was GNU Free Documentation License. Is that the preferred license
for the man pages?

I vaguely recall trying to generate this from SGML many years ago and then
deciding it would be easier just to maintain troff. troff is the canonical
source now, though. There is a LICENCE section in the document that says
it's GPL2+, which has the advantage of keeping the whole package
consistent, so please use that. I wrote most of the manpage.