Re: [PATCH] Documentation/technical/api-hashmap: Remove source highlighting

From: Anders Kaseorg <andersk@mit.edu>
Date: May 18, 2014, 00:50 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.02.1405172035160.44324@all-night-tool.MIT.EDU>
In-Reply-To: <20140517152219.GA31912@hudson.localdomain>

On Sat, 17 May 2014, Jeremiah Mahler wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> I agree that a broken document is an unacceptable failure mode.
> 
> But I do not understand why 'source-highlight' is not an install
> requirement for 'git-doc'.  If I install 'source-highlight' on
> my Debian machine the code looks great.
> 
>   apt-get install source-highlight

Yes; when I noticed this failure, I asked Jonathan to add source-highlight as a build dependency in Debian (https://bugs.debian.org/745591). But then Ubuntu forked the packaging to revert this change (https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1316810), because source-highlight in the community-supported universe repository is not allowed to be a build dependency of git in the Canonical-supported main repository. So now the Ubuntu package still has broken documentation _and_ it’s lost the ability to automatically synchronize updates from Debian.

If we’re going to make Git depend on source-highlight, then we would want to make sure it’s documented in INSTALL and that its absence is properly diagnosed. Maybe then we could make the argument to Canonical that source-highlight should become officially supported in main (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuMainInclusionRequirements).

But I don’t that would be worth it just to make one page of the API documentation a little more colorful (and it sounds like you agree).

Anders