Re: WIP: asciidoc replacement

From: Martin Langhoff <martin.langhoff@gmail.com>
Date: Oct 4, 2007, 22:49 UTC
Message-ID: <46a038f90710041549v3357a0f8j53b1d2fc24b73210@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <85tzp6oavq.fsf@lola.goethe.zz>

On 10/5/07, David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> "Martin Langhoff" <martin.langhoff@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > With AsciiDoc we've managed to avoid the arcane format, but we are
> > still laden with a horrid toolchain.
>
> Let's put this somewhat into perspective: the toolchain is horrid with
> regard to the complexity and documentation

Exactly. I'm not complaining about asciidoc itself. But the toolchain is very fragile, and not crossplatform. Git compiles and works on many unixen, win32, and some embedded posixy OSs if IIRC.

OTOH asciidoc can be pretty hard to get going even on modern linuxen.The asciidoc toolchain doesn't even work on Debian Sarge, which isn't *that* old, while I'm pretty sure git itself can be built and used on older linuxen. That's where a good old regex-insanity Perl-based parser beats anything else: no dependencies, works everywhere.

In that sense, this is close to being a rehash of the "let's use autoconf" argument...

cheers

martin