Because of user demand, in addition to full Texinfo manuals, man pages
are provided which contain extracts from those manuals. These man
pages are generated from the Texinfo manuals using
contrib/texi2pod.pl
and pod2man
. (The man page for
g++
, cp/g++.1
, just contains a .so
reference
to gcc.1
, but all the other man pages are generated from
Texinfo manuals.)
Because many systems may not have the necessary tools installed to
generate the man pages, they are only generated if the
configure
script detects that recent enough tools are
installed, and the Makefiles allow generating man pages to fail
without aborting the build. Man pages are also included in release
distributions. They are generated in the source directory.
Magic comments in Texinfo files starting @c man
control what
parts of a Texinfo file go into a man page. Only a subset of Texinfo
is supported by texi2pod.pl
, and it may be necessary to add
support for more Texinfo features to this script when generating new
man pages. To improve the man page output, some special Texinfo
macros are provided in doc/include/gcc-common.texi
which
texi2pod.pl
understands:
@gcctabopt
@table @gcctabopt
for tables of options,
where for printed output the effect of @code
is better than
that of @option
but for man page output a different effect is
wanted.
@gccoptlist
@gol
@gccoptlist
. This is
necessary to avoid problems with differences in how the
@gccoptlist
macro is handled by different Texinfo formatters.
FIXME: describe the texi2pod.pl
input language and magic
comments in more detail.