Re: [RFC suggestion] Generate manpage directly with Asciidoctor

> On Sun, May 09, 2021 at 10:20:37AM +0200, Martin Ågren wrote:
> > In general, I agree. I do think it's important that "most people
> > contributing to Git", whatever that means, can build the documentation
> > to check the part they're adding/modifying and not find it broken left
> > and right. They would then (quite rightly) not even bother building it.
> 
> Agreed. But I think that is mostly the case (asciidoctor seems no harder
> to acquire on most modern systems than asciidoc; there are system
> packages in most cases, and decent binary-package systems for both ruby
> and python if you really need it).
> 
> It does create a situation where people like Randall on NonStop might
> need to do part of their dev work on another, more mainstream platform.
> But I suspect that is already the case.

> > When we looked at xmlto-less rendering around two years ago [1], we
> > found various asciidoctor bugs up to and around version 2.0. We would
> > likely need to require some >=2.0.x. The exact requirements will
> > probably only become clear when someone really does the work.
> 
> That does make things a little less convenient; Debian stable, for
> instance, still has 1.5.8.

> It's not too hard to install an updated gem, but not quite as nice as
> using the system package (it also makes things weird for building the
> stable Debian package itself, which would want to rely only on other
> packages; but of course any proposed change to the doc toolchain would
> be for new versions, and would not get backported there anyway).

> > I think what I'm arguing for is
> > 
> >   1) switch the default to asciidoctor,
> >   2) enable optionally using it without xmlto,
> >   3) figure out what broke and fix it, and document which is the minimum
> >      asciidoctor version we're going to bother with for (2),
> >   4) lather, rinse, repeat (3),
> >   5) switch the default to not using xmlto,
> >   6) drop the xmlto way of generating the manpages(?).
> 
> I'm unclear when support for python asciidoc goes away here. Is it part
> of step 6 (because it does not have another way of generating them)? Or
> does it live on forever as a non-default legacy system? I'd prefer not,
> but as long as we are clear about the primary target and leave it up to
> people interested in the legacy to do the compat fixes, that might be
> OK.