Bug#280148: pod2man should create bold references

[Niko Tyni]

On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 10:25:55AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Niko Tyni <ntyni at debian.org> writes:
> > On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 11:24:53AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> 
> >> I'm a little reluctant to change this because pod2man has been using
> >> italics since before I started to maintain it.  man-pages(7) is a good
> >> reference, though, since it's a concrete style guide with some general
> >> weight behind it, although the BSD style guide is also fairly concrete
> >> and doesn't add markup.
> 
> > If there are non-trivial differences between platform-specific style
> > recommendations, how about making the output 'dialect' configurable?  Or
> > do you think that's too much bloat?
> 
> > I can see problems with functional differences (like enabling '--utf8')
> > between dialects, but for purely cosmetic things like bold vs. italic
> > this could work.
> 
> Hm, that's not a bad idea, although I'm not sure to what degree it will
> address the original concern.  I think most man pages generated by pod2man
> are generated as part of the build process for Perl or for Perl modules,
> where there isn't a good place to add additional options.  It would work
> for people running it by hand who wanted a different behavior, though.

Well, a logical next step would be to make the default pod2man run-time
dialect configurable at podlators build time, and the one after that would
be for the build scripts to choose the default based on $^O and the like.
-- 
Niko