Distro packaging

[lassik]

A Nix package is in the works: https://repology.org/project/scheme-manpages/versions

[weinholt]

Interesting, that's quite early. :)

[arthurgleckler]

What would this mean, exactly? Full versions of the R6RS and R7RS Small PDFs converted to man-page format?

[weinholt]

Well, not quite. Man pages are a very different format from the reports.

My process so far has roughly been:

• Pick one of the auto-generated templates and move it to man3/.
• Open up the R4RS—R7RS & IEEE documents and find the relevant procedure.
• Copy from the reports into DESCRIPTION and note differences in COMPATIBILITY & STANDARDS.
• Separate and reorganize the material, e.g. using subheadings or moving material to other sections.
• Copy examples if there are any, otherwise write examples. I try to connect them to something concrete instead of just "a b c 1 2 3" stuff.
• Write IMPLEMENTATION NOTES, APPLICATION USAGE, HISTORY, BUGS, etc sections as relevant.

The man page format creates the opportunity to share a lot more information than the brief description in the reports.

Here's an example of a rendered manpage: https://gist.github.com/weinholt/9710fb0e9bd4b3e24ca0f1f33cb55537

[arthurgleckler]

This is wonderful! Thanks for doing it.

[arthurgleckler]

Is there any way to capture the signatures you extract in the process in such a way that we can use them elsewhere? For example, I'm manually extracting signatures from the SRFIs in this document:

https://github.com/scheme-requests-for-implementation/srfi-common/blob/master/index/signatures.scm

It would be great if your work could be automatically converted into other formats like this.

By no means am I asking for you to add work to what must already be a big project. But if it's easy, or if you're already doing something that would make capturing signatures easier, please let me know.

[weinholt]

The signatures are in this script: https://github.com/schemedoc/manpages/blob/master/src/make-templates.scm. They're not all good, the list was extracted mostly automatically using schsigs: https://gitlab.com/weinholt/schjig/-/blob/master/schsigs.scm. It uses eval to search for the signatures. It kind of works most of the time. :) No idea if this approach is reusable. If the libraries are in library or define-library format then Akku can also extract a list of exports.

[lassik]

To get RnRS signatures from the TeX sources: https://github.com/schemedoc/rnrs-metadata Also mostly broken :p But could be fixed without inordinate effort.

[lassik]

• Open up the R4RS—R7RS & IEEE documents and find the relevant procedure.

Can the IEEE Scheme standard (or a good enough draft) be read on the internet somewhere? Ideally we'd upload a copy to https://standards.scheme.org/ but if there are copyright restrictions on that, we could link to a copy elsewhere. Currently I just link to IEEE's page where one can buy it, but I don't expect many people to buy a phased-out standard.

[weinholt]

Can the IEEE Scheme standard (or a good enough draft) be read on the internet somewhere?

I think students at many universities can access it (that's how I got my copy back in the day) and maybe it's available through that one service that opens up scientific papers, but I'm not sure.

[lassik]

There is now a scheme-manpages package in our unofficial Homebrew Lisp tap.