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

> Hi,
> 
> Junio C Hamano wrote:
> > Git 2.27-rc2 will be tagged soon, but most of the topics planned for
> > it are already in 'master'.
> 
> 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.