Re: [PATCH 0/6] Doc: drop support for docbook-xsl before 1.74
- From
brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
- Date
- Apr 2, 2020, 00:45 UTC
- Message-ID
- <20200402004533.GA6369@camp.crustytoothpaste.net>
- In-Reply-To
- <20200401101716.GC60227@coredump.intra.peff.net>
On 2020-04-01 at 10:17:16, Jeff King wrote:
Show 21 quoted lines
> On Tue, Mar 31, 2020 at 09:26:00PM +0200, Martin Ågren wrote:
>
> > But most importantly: When I looked into the history, I came upon
> > c2a7f5d438 ("docs: monospace listings in docbook output", 2012-08-07),
> > which made me worry about breaking "make info". On second thought, I
> > might have broken it many times already over the past few years, since
> > I've never built the info. So maybe worrying about that all of a sudden
> > is a bit unfounded in a way. :-/
> >
> > (I tried to build "info" while working on this. It works in the sense
> > that it doesn't error out, but I don't get anything that looks remotely
> > useful. I've never used info at all though, to be honest, so could be
> > missing something fundamental.)
>
> I don't find "info" useful, either. The big thing it offers over "man"
> is actual hyperlinks, but linkgit attributes (the only thing we actually
> bother annotating) don't seem to actually become links! These days I'd
> expect most people interested in hyperlinking to just use HTML. I
> wouldn't be surprised if there's some emacs integration with info,
> though, so maybe people use it there. I dunno. I'd be happy to see all
> of the info bits go away.I believe Emacs does have good integration with the info format. I personally prefer documentation in almost any other format and would also be happy to see it go away, but Emacs users may find it convenient.
Junio, I believe you use Emacs. Do you have an opinion on whether, on the whole, Emacs users are likely to make good use of the info documentation?
> I've add brian to the cc, since he was the last person to touch texi > stuff (though he may have just been doing it out of a sense of > cleanup/duty).
I clearly see the commit in the history with my name on it and the explanation seems like something I might have written, but I have no recollection of touching that code or writing the patch at all. I very likely only touched it because I felt compelled not to introduce a regression (although, as you mentioned, I failed).
Show 9 quoted lines
> The .texi generated for the user-manual is the same before and after > your patch, so I think it's OK to do. > > There _is_ an older regression in the user-manual, though. After commit > 03920ac69b (asciidoctor: fix user-manual to be built by `asciidoctor`, > 2017-01-02), the whole front-matter is missing from the generated > "git.info" file, and there's a funky ": idm4" node. Nobody seems to have > noticed or complained since then (though perhaps people are more likely > to look at the manpages than the user manual).
If nobody seems to care very much for the info documentation, we could drop it. I've put a query out on Twitter to see if anyone I know is using it.
-- brian m. carlson: Houston, Texas, US OpenPGP: https://keybase.io/bk2204