Re: [PATCH 04/11] doc: use asciidoctor to build man pages directly

From: Martin Ågren <martin.agren@gmail.com>
Date: May 14, 2021, 15:38 UTC
Message-ID: <CAN0heSpX53tK8Z4XSx4sp79b+XWKZg5+ABW8pmzBSHPZ+qy+oQ@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20210514121435.504423-5-felipe.contreras@gmail.com>

On Fri, 14 May 2021 at 14:14, Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

>
> There's no need to use xmlto to build the man pages when modern
> asciidoctor can do it by itself.
>
> This new mode will be active only when USE_ASCIIDOCTOR is set.

May I suggest incorporating something more like brian's patch here [1], so that there's a separate knob for this thing?

The commit message is short on details and makes it sound like this is it, we're done. But then there are several patches to fix up things. Which is a good approach, so that this patch doesn't need to do several things at once. This commit message could say something about it, e.g.,

  The doc-diff here [which doc-diff? see below] is a XYZ-line diff.
  Large parts of this difference will be addressed in the following
  patches.

About the use of doc-diff: If this commit introduces a new knob rather than taking over USE_ASCIIDOCTOR=Yes, the next patch could be Peff's patch to doc-diff that compares the two asciidoctor approaches [2], and then the next few patches could diff between them. That would get the asciidoc-vs-asciidoctor differences out of the way, so you can focus on asciidoctor-vs-asciidoctor.

With a separate knob, it would feel like a lot easier decision to take something like this. There are over 11000 lines in the doc-diff after applying your series, and there's the missing boldness for literals. Maybe those differences are all great (I would be missing the bold literals, though). If this series doesn't affect someone using "vanilla" USE_ASCIIDOCTOR=Yes, we could let this thing cook in master and work incrementally on top.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/git/20210514003104.94644-2-sandals@crustytoothpaste.net/

[2] https://lore.kernel.org/git/YJt81neO7zsGz2ah@coredump.intra.peff.net/

Martin