Re: What's cooking in git.git (May 2020, #08; Sun, 24)

Hi,

Junio C Hamano wrote:

There's a minor issue in the ss/faq-ignore topic which breaks the doc build on CentOS/ RHEL 6 that was mentioned by Son Luong Ngoc¹. The "." in the anchor text causes an issue for the older doc toolchain on these systems.

I included a simple patch for that in a reply². I haven't seen any discussion on it one way or another. At the risk of pestering, I thought I'd mention it in case it had just flown under everyone's radar during this busy time.

On one hand, the doc build toolchain on CentOS / RHEL 6 is old and those systems will be EOL at the end of November. So we might find it acceptable to stop supporting the doc build there.

On the other hand, the fix/workaround is quite trivial and nearly imperceptible to readers of the documentation. The problematic "." in ".gitiginore" only appears in the anchor link for HTML viewers or in the plain text for readers of the .txt file:

    [[files-in-.gitignore-are-tracked]]

vs.

    [[files-in-gitignore-are-tracked]]

I'm not sure there's enough value in keeping the "." in this case to justify breaking the doc build for users stuck on an old CentOS / RHEL 6 system.

I think the risk of applying the patch is sufficiently low that it would be worth including in 2.27.0. That is, unless there is a strong opinion that the "." is quite useful or that even low effort isn't worth taking to support such an old doc toolchain.

¹ https://lore.kernel.org/git/CAL3xRKdwOASiGys+7Uu_OA5kBPrTdAURfEw3UQ+rguTXT+C6JQ@mail.gmail.com/ ² https://lore.kernel.org/git/20200519045301.GY24220@pobox.com/

Thanks,