[darcs-users] pandoc "plain text" output for darcs foo --help

[Trent W. Buck]

[CCing the pandoc maintainer, because this might be a feature
request.]

How do people feel about assuming man(1) is installed where they run
"darcs foo --help"?

Darcs currently has four output goals for its documentation:

  - HTML and PDF (both currently via LaTeX);
  - roff (via internal kludges) for the manpage; and
  - plain text, for "darcs foo --help".

The first three are straightforward if Darcs documentation is stored
internally as reST (or as raw pandoc objects), converted at
compile-time using the pandoc library.

But Pandoc has no "plain text" output format.
I guess the approach normally used is either

  - Suck it up and read the markdown source; or
  - Generate HTML and stuff it through e.g. lynx -dump.

I think that instead of doing either of these things, when a user runs
"darcs foo --help", we use Pandoc to emit *roff* output, dump it to a
temp file, then run man(1) or groff on it to generate output on the
terminal.

The benefits of this approach are that Pandoc doesn't need to be
extended with a "plain text" output format, and that users get nice
pretty (e.g. bold and underlining) output when they run "darcs foo
--help".  The down side is that it "darcs help --output" won't work
unless man(1) is installed.

Another alternative that I don't like would be to have "darcs foo
--help" write an HTML file and then run $BROWSER on it, which is kinda
like lynx -dump.