Re: [RFC suggestion] Generate manpage directly with Asciidoctor

From: brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
Date: May 7, 2021, 20:25 UTC
Message-ID: <YJWiQH2nf0B14Zy7@camp.crustytoothpaste.net>
In-Reply-To: <3461c7b0-594d-989e-3048-2fc6583084ad@gmail.com>

On 2021-05-07 at 06:06:31, Bagas Sanjaya wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> Hi,
> 
> Asciidoctor has support for directly generating manpage, see [1].
> 
> We support using Asciidoctor as drop-in replacement for original
> Asciidoc, but currently we need to use xmlto together with Asciidoc(tor)
> to produce manpages. However, most users don't inclined to install
> xmlto toolchain, partly because they had to download more than 300 MB
> of data just to install xmlto and its dependencies (including dblatex
> and texlive).

If you're installing on Debian, you want to install with --no-install-recommends to avoid the dependency on dblatex or fop, libpaper-utils, and zip. That should avoid the large downloads.

> So completely migrating to Asciidoctor can eliminate xmlto requirement
> for generating manpage.
> 
> What do you think about above?

I didn't do this because it makes things very complicated in the Makefile and my goal was to minimize the needed changes and divergence. I'm not opposed to someone else doing it, but I expect it will be a bunch of work.

It also doesn't help if you're generating more than just the manual pages, since generating the PDFs will definitely require xmlto and either dblatex or fop. I personally prefer fop over dblatex, but folks have different opinions.

-- 
brian m. carlson (he/him or they/them)
Houston, Texas, US