Re: [RFC suggestion] Generate manpage directly with Asciidoctor

From: Martin Ågren <martin.agren@gmail.com>
Date: May 11, 2021, 18:45 UTC
Message-ID: <CAN0heSp6uw7yqNZLD5w13xJUgnUtgHM0OYw9KQ6Z-FKk+x4OPA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <YJmykGWaWi03+WoW@coredump.intra.peff.net>

On Tue, 11 May 2021 at 00:24, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

>
> On Sun, May 09, 2021 at 10:20:37AM +0200, Martin Ågren wrote:
>
> > it was. So it's not so much "we should flip to avoid a bitrotting
> > dependency" as it is "asciidoctor is arguably nicer" or "it's the way
> > forward".
>
> I'm OK with those arguments, too. :)

Excellent. :)

Show 12 quoted lines

> > 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).

Right. And 1.5.8 is perfectly fine for ascidoctor *with* xmlto, i.e., as long as we're discussing moving away from asciidoc, not moving away from xmlto entirely. And soon enough, Debian stable should be at 2.12. ;-) (I realize Debian stable was just an example.)

Show 16 quoted lines

> > 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.

I think I meant it to happen somewhere in step 3 or 4, I just didn't call it out. If it happens super-early in step 3, that would perhaps be a bit unfortunate. But if fixing up the last few bits of xmlto-vs-no-xmlto with asciidoctor involves giving up on asciidoc, then so be it... If nothing else, we might all of a sudden find that our asciidoc-processed docs look awful and that nobody seems to have noticed.

Martin