asciidoc, was Re: Chicken/egg problem building from a 'git clone'

> 2009/3/6 Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>:
>
> > On Fri, 6 Mar 2009, Jakub Narebski wrote:
> >
> >> Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:
> >> > On Thu, Mar 05, 2009 at 01:38:27PM +0100, Matthieu Moy wrote:
> >> >
> >> >>>> * we have lots other files in git.git that are autogenerated (the
> >> >>>> documentation files, for example)
> >> >>>
> >> >>> I'm not aware of any auto-generated files that are checked in. Can you
> >> >>> give an example?
> >> >>
> >> >> man pages and html docs are commited, but in a separate branch. IOW,
> >> >> Junio abuses Git as a distribution mechanism, but keeps it totally
> >> >> separate from the actual sources.
> >> >
> >> > OK, true; but that is a totally different mechanism, unless the proposal
> >> > is to autobuild a "this would be the release tarball" branch similar to
> >> > html and man branches.
> >>
> >> I thnk the proposal was to have 'configure' branch with configure
> >> script built, similar to how 'html' and 'man' branches have built
> >> documentation in HTML and manpages format.
> >>
> >> However while toolchain needed to produce documentation (asciidoc +
> >> xmlto) isn't, I think, something very common, in my opinion autoconf is
> >> something that is present on systems containing other build tools
> >> required to build git from sources.  So 'configure' branch is not, I
> >> think, as necessary as 'html' and 'man' branches; additionally 'html'
> >> branch (or the repository used to build documentation, or the byproduct
> >> of building documentation) is used to generate on-line docs for git.
> >
> > Plus, keep in mind that autoconf support is only an afterthought in Git;
> > Just running "make" is supposed to work.  If it does not, patches are
> > certainly welcome, I think.
> 
> Well now that you mention it.. :-)
> 
> It doesn't check for the existance of asciidoc, but blindly assumes it
> exists.  And even if you do have asciidoc, there's a good chance that
> you have the wrong version.   The INSTALL file says that asciidoc
> requires 8.2.7 but most distros (debian, ubuntu.  probably other) have
> 8.2.6.
> If you compile the docs with the wrong asciidoc version, there is no
> warning or error at all.  It just builds incorrect man pages.