This documentation is written in reStructuredText, and produced using Sphinx and the numpydoc extension. The documentation source should be fairly readable without processing, but you can compile the documentation, you’ll need to install Sphinx and numpydoc:
$ easy_install Sphinx
$ easy_install numpydoc
See the reStructuredText quick reference and the NumPy/SciPy documentation guide for an introduction to the documentation syntax.
The man-page source be.1.xml is writen in DocBook 5 [1] format. The Makefile converts it to roff(7) format using an XSLT stylesheet. See DocBook XSL [2] for details. See Installing BE for suggestions on setting up a DocBook 5 toolchain in several distributions.
The man page should conform to Debian policy.
[1] | See Norman Walsh’s DocBook 5: The Definitive Guide |
[2] | See Bob Stayton’s DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide |