[Nut-upsuser] UPS configuration issue?

[Jim Klimov]

Hi Sam,

  Not really sure what you mean here. NUT documentation is written in
asciidoc, so that it is easy to combine from several source files and
render into man pages, HTML, PDF, etc. (which does go via docbook XML as a
technical detail of asciidoc, and does result in some *roff files as a
technical detail of man page rendering, but in NUT sources/recipes we do
not directly care about either of those aspects). Allegedly there are a few
quirks with Asciidoc as well (notably there are several renderers out
there, but any semblance of a formal standard and common testing suite was
being discussed as brewing up on FOSDEM 2025), but it is pretty convenient
and light-weight once you get a hold of it.

  NUT "dist" tarballs, including release snapshots, do include a copy of
generated man pages (probably in a *roff format) for the benefit of
end-users who only have a compiler and do not want to burden their systems
and build times with asciidoc/docbook/etc. tooling. So they can just build
NUT programs, `make install`, and have them nicely documented out of the
box. Those generated files are not tracked in Git.

  Full-scale builds such as for packaging are encouraged to have the full
stack in the build agent (or build root) and re-generate these documents.
This might, depending on local settings, add distro watermarks ("NUT pages
as part of OS XXX docs"), apply distro-wide build timestamp, use the *roff
version that OS is comfortable with, or whatever.

  Also note that since NUT v2.8.3 we added support for `configure` options
to assign man section codes (numbers or not) for systems that do not follow
suit of Linux and BSD numbering (e.g. in Solaris/illumos, the system
commands are historically not "8" but "1m"). Previously this required
strange patch files on packager side, a burden to be revised/updated for
each NUT release; now it requires just a few configure options that can be
left in the recipe once and forever.

Hope this clarifies a few points?
Jim Klimov


On Mon, May 12, 2025 at 1:50 PM Sam Varshavchik <mrsam at courier-mta.com>
wrote:

> Jim Klimov via Nut-upsuser writes:
>
> > Alas, with NUT's long history starting when computers were tools of the
> > relatively few engineer nerd types, much of the documentation remains
> > "elitist".
> >
> > Partially due to this, I've started a new manual page (after release
> v2.8.3)
> > so people can get a reasonable overview of the NUT layering and some
> > practical caveats by uttering `man nut`.
>
> It also doesn't help things that nroff has survived since ancient times,
> back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
>
> nroff is long overdue for retirement. It served its purpose. But there
> are
> better tools out there, now. Sadly, Linux still insists on keeping this
> fossil.
>
> > Surprisingly, there was no such
> > thing for over the quarter of a century that the project has been out
> there!
>
> That's about the timeframe back when I started writing my manual pages in
> Docbook XML, and generating beautiful HTML documentation from it, as well
> as
> legacy man pages.
>
> I even started a project that successfully converted all Linux manual
> pages
> from nroff into Docbook XML. Sadly it did not get any traction, and I
> shut
> it down a few years ago.
>
> I humbly suggest that you use Docbook XML for your original source, and
> then
> just have it spew out nroff, and also have something nice that can be
> thrown
> onto a web server.
>
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