Auto-generate man pages

[leifericf]

Excerpt from "Build Awesome Command-Line Applications in Ruby" (page 51):

Unfortunately, neither OptionParser nor GLI provide a way to autogenerate a man page so that your documentation can automatically be kept consistent. Perhaps you’ll be inspired and create such a system.

This sounds like a very useful feature to add and, at the time of writing, I'm feeling inspired.

My skill level is not high enough to implement this feature (yet), but maybe we can get a discussion going on how this could best be implemented? Anyone else interested in this feature?

[davetron5000]

In theory, the way the help system is designed, you could generate either a man page directly, or something that could be fed into the tools discussed in the book:

• https://github.com/davetron5000/gli/wiki/RDoc#other-documentation-formats
• https://github.com/davetron5000/gli/blob/gli-2/lib/gli/commands/doc.rb#L56
• https://github.com/davetron5000/gli/blob/gli-2/lib/gli/commands/rdoc_document_listener.rb

By using the document listener, you can get fed all parsed help documentation without having to worry about it yourself.

Developing this stuff via test-driven-development is somewhat tricky, but you could make a feature in features/ that basically runs the custom document listener as a sanity check.

[davetron5000]

Closing as old, though I think this would be a good feature.