Actual man pages

[AstraLuma]

What is the problem or limitation you are having?

Can't actually write man pages

Describe the solution you'd like

Take in troff, ship man page

Describe alternatives you've considered

• Make a wrapping script that temporarily overrides the long description
• Run a side process that watches for briefcase to write out the man page and rewrite it
• Munge the resulting packages to insert the correct man page

Additional context

This was discussed in discord

[aviralgarg05]

I would like to solve this issue

[freakboy3742]

Sounds like a reasonable suggestion. The man page template generated by Briefcase gets the job done in terms of providing a man file, but it's clearly inadequate a full documentation.

The long description text also needs to be usable for other purposes (such as various parts of the RPM/DEB package building process), so adding troff markup to long_description won't really be viable. Adding troff content to pyproject.toml also sounds like a recipe for an unwieldy pyproject.toml file.

My suggestion here would be to provide a complete override for man page handling. The template produces app name.1 based on formal name, long description etc. However, we could allow a user to define:

man_page = "path/to/manpage.1"

which provides a full manpage file in troff format. If man_page isn't defined, the templated file is left as-is; but if it is specified, the file can be copied into the app as a complete replacement for the templated manfile as part of the app resources step.

[freakboy3742]

@aviralgarg05 If you want to try your hand at fixing this, go right ahead. We don't formally assign issues to users; we'll consider any PR that implements the feature as described.

[apeksha-code-maker]

“I would like to work on this issue

[mhsmith]

@aviralgarg05: are you is still working on this? Even if your work is incomplete, it might be worth posting it as a draft PR so others can use it as a starting point.