Re: [PATCH 1/2] bitmap-format.txt: fix some formatting issues

From: Abhradeep Chakraborty <chakrabortyabhradeep79@gmail.com>
Date: Jun 7, 2022, 10:25 UTC
Message-ID: <20220607102504.2243-1-chakrabortyabhradeep79@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqsfohbxbp.fsf@gitster.g>

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

> Identify those who may have input with "git log --no-merges" and add
> them here, perhaps?

Thanks, I hopefully cc'd all the people who can give some input about the patch except Peff. I got to know that he took a break so I decided not to cc him (will surely do if you say). I would love to hear from other people who has knowledge on asciidoc.

I previously informed Taylor and Kaartic about the patch but forgot to cc them :P

Another thing to note that the checksum that I included in the last commit is suggested by Taylor himself. I was having problem to understand some portion of `load_bitmap_header()` (because I wasn't aware of the trailing checksum) when he cleared my doubt by saying that a trailer checksum exists and also suggested to make a PR addressing that -

> I'm glad that it was helpful! If you think others may be confused by the same, feel free to write a patch modifying Documentation/technical/bitmap-format.txt to point out the trailing checksum.

Junio wrote -

> Are we missing another step that must come much earlier than this
> patch?  It seems to me that Documentation/Makefile does not even
> consider that we should feed this file to AsciiDoc.

I also think the same. At first, I thought this is intentional. When I ran `make doc` (to test the resulting html file), it didn't generate any html file for bitmap-format.txt. But thankfully there is an online asciidoc editor[1] where you can check the resulting html file. You also can check the resulting html by copy-pasting the content[2] of my github branch bitmap-format file to that editor.

Will write a patch for it.

The current broken page can be found at - https://git-scm.com/docs/bitmap-format

> Do these blank lines hurt very badly how the end-result is formatted
> in HTML?  Does the extra indentation between the line with "The
> following flags are supported" on it and the two bullet items in the
> header make the output better in significant way?

Answering to the first question - yes, those are necessary to improve the html readability (you can verify that by including and removing the blank lines in the editor and obsering the changes). This ensures that all the related paragraphes are contained in the same block.

The extra identations are not necessary. I add those because I thought that these would be visually better for html page readers. If you think it does the opposite, I can remove those.

I tried to use two bullets as less as possible ( In most cases, nested lists came under <pre> blocks, so I didn't have to use two bullets). But in one case, I had to use it for nested lists (Try the editor to see the rendered output).

Show 5 quoted lines

> These changes make the input text much harder to read, and are not
> very welcome, so unless they are part of "fixing generated HTML is
> broken", please omit them.  As evidenced by the lack of HTML output
> in the build system, a lot more folks read this document in text than
> in HTML, and readability of the source matters.

Okay, I will then remove those extra indentations. But besides that, all are necessary.

I admit that readability of source matters but I think html pages are also important (even more important) for people who don't have the source codes and want to know the git internals.

Thanks :)

[1] https://asciidoclive.com/edit/scratch/1 [2] https://github.com/Abhra303/git/blob/fix-doc-formatting/Documentation/technical/bitmap-format.txt