From: Timo Hirvonen Date: Sat, 04 Aug 2007 12:51:29 GMT Subject: Re: [ANNOUNCE] GIT 1.5.3-rc4 Message-ID: <20070804155129.a20cdb9b.tihirvon@gmail.com> In-Reply-To: Johannes Schindelin wrote: > Hi, > > On Sat, 4 Aug 2007, Timo Hirvonen wrote: > > > I used asciidoc too but it was really PITA to install and use > > I disagree. Whenever I had the need, installing asciidoc was pretty > swift. No problems at all. Well asciidoc doesn't even have a Makefile. You have to copy the files manually (maybe it's easier now, I don't know). Also getting it work correctly with xsl-stylesheets etc. was really frustrating experience. Now there's asciidoc, xmlto etc. in Arch Linux community repo but I wouldn't be surprised if it couldn't build the GIT documentation. > > so I wrote a small tool (ttman) in C which converts .txt files directly > > to man pages. > > I was impressed! Right until I saw that > > - it rolls its own parser/lexer without using bison/flex, which > makes it much longer than necessary, I've never liked parser generators. > - it looks like a perl script doing the same job would have been > even smaller yet, and Very likely but perl is incompatible with my brain :) > - the syntax is nowhere near asciidoc syntax. I needed something really simple. asciidoc's syntax is full of surprises and it's much harder to parse. Of course having a perl script which could convert asciidoc files directly to man and html would be really nice. We just need some brave perl hacker to write the script. > For official releases, I'd still want to rely on asciidoc. Agreed, rushing to change the documentation format wouldn't be wise. -- http://onion.dynserv.net/~timo/