RE: [RFC suggestion] Generate manpage directly with Asciidoctor
On May 7, 2021 6:58 PM, brian m. carlson wrote:
Show 30 quoted lines
>Subject: Re: [RFC suggestion] Generate manpage directly with Asciidoctor
>
>On 2021-05-07 at 12:02:13, Randall S. Becker wrote:
>> On May 7, 2021 2:07 AM, Bagas Sanjaya wrote:
>> >To: Git Users <git@vger.kernel.org>
>> >Subject: [RFC suggestion] Generate manpage directly with Asciidoctor
>> >Asciidoctor has support for directly generating manpage, see [1].
>> >
>> >We support using Asciidoctor as drop-in replacement for original
>> >Asciidoc, but currently we need to use xmlto together with
>> >Asciidoc(tor) to produce manpages. However, most users don't inclined
>> >to install xmlto toolchain, partly because they had to download more
>> >than 300 MB of data just to install xmlto and its dependencies (including
>dblatex and texlive).
>> >
>> >So completely migrating to Asciidoctor can eliminate xmlto
>> >requirement for generating manpage.
>> >
>> >What do you think about above?
>>
>> Our toolchain does not support asciidoctor itself because of porting issues. I
>am not sure it is available everywhere.
>
>I think Asciidoctor is pure Ruby, since it also uses JRuby and Opal to run in Java
>and JavaScript environments. Ruby is relatively portable to most architectures
>and systems (for example, it runs on 16 Debian architectures).
>
>Is the problem in your case Ruby or is it Asciidoctor itself? I'm happy to send
>portability patches to Asciidoctor if necessary, but I'm not sure I'm a good
>candidate to send patches to Ruby itself, especially for an OS I don't use.
In this case, Ruby is not 100% portable to all platforms. I have an old port, but the latest version is not portable because of unportable dependencies - not for a lack of a large amount of trying. So the assumption is not entirely workable. My only option is to take the pre-generated pages from the manpages repo.
-Randall
Randall S. Becker <rsbecker@nexbridge.com>