Ship with pre-built man page

[sighook]

Hello,

It would be great to supply a distribution kit with a pre-built (markdown + converted one) man page for those (like me) who are too lazy to build ghc/pandoc or don't want to complicate the package building by downloading the binary pandoc just for one page. This happens in the practice of FSF projects, and it makes life a lot easier.

Thank you very much for this project.

Kindly Regards,
Alex.

[obfusk]

I don't want to add a pre-built man page to the source repo, but I could add it to the release separately if extracting it from the provided .deb is too inconvenient.

[sighook]

Downloading both sources and the deb package to extract the man page is a bit odd, from maintaining points of view, but adding it to the release tarball is a good compromise. This still prevents building a bleeding edge package, but at least we can get a good balance between maintainer & developer efforts.
Thanks for responding to the request.

[obfusk]

release tarball

There is no release tarball other than the one automatically provided by GitHub. I'd like to support your use case but adding a second release tarball would be confusing and more work. I'm willing to add the man page as a separate asset to the release so you don't need to extract it from the .deb. I'm of course also happy to consider alternative solutions if you can think of any.

[sighook]

I'm willing to add the man page as a separate asset to the release so you don't need to extract it from the .deb.

Hmmm... Got it. Wait, this adds a bit of work to you with less benefit for others. I'm glad that you came to help, but I don't want to burden you with a job that only I will use. You're very kind, thank you, really.

I'm of course also happy to consider alternative solutions if you can think of any.

I can propose two solutions which I can implement and provide PR for review:

1. clean nroff man page
   • Pros: no converting needed
   • Cons: no web preview
2. perldoc (example)
   • Pros: web preview, Linux Standard Base
   • Cons: ?

If you are willing to consider any of the proposed, I will be glad to implement that.

[obfusk]

Sorry, I get that pandoc is a pretty heavy dependency, but I'm not going to switch away from using markdown for the man page.

[obfusk]

But I'm happy to add the man page to the release assets if that works for you.

[sighook]

Hello,

Sorry for the long response. Amount of things fell out to do, phew. 😮‍💨

Apropos the man page: Since I'm the only one willing here, it doesn't make much sense to add extra work for you. I'm totally fine with adding (as packager) the reference to the online manual in the package's post-install or package's README file so there is no need for any exceptional actions. Because these actions simply doesn't reducing the maintaining efforts in general, but adding to you some additional things we can both do without.

Thanks again for your project. 🤗
P.S. With deep respect, I leave you the right to close the issue if we've exhausted the subject.