Subject: Re: [ANNOUNCE] GIT 1.5.3-rc4

From: Steven Grimm <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 04 Aug 2007 11:49:54 +0800

Junio C Hamano wrote:
> The asciidoc toolchain used by us (either AsciiDoc 7 nor 8) does
> not seem to work well with docbook-xsl 1.72 and 1.73, it seems.
>   

How attached are we to asciidoc? Every time I do a clean build and sit 
there twiddling my thumbs waiting for xmlto to do its thing, I think to 
myself, "If this were a dedicated Perl script to do the syntax 
transformations directly to man and html formats, it would blast through 
all the .txt files in a second or two total." It seems outlandish to me 
that it takes longer to build the (relatively small) documentation than 
it does to build the actual code. Plus we constantly run into this sort 
of problem.

Do we want to keep using asciidoc (e.g., so people can easily export to 
other asciidoc-supported formats), or is a dedicated renderer something 
we'd consider switching to? I have a flight from China back to the US 
coming in a couple weeks; this could be a perfect little project to keep 
me occupied between in-flight movies. It doesn't look like the syntax 
transformations are very hard, and it'd be easy enough to verify 
correctness by just comparing against the existing asciidoc output.

Am I correct in observing that "*roff -man" and HTML are the only two 
output formats we care about, or do people use other formats in their 
private branches?

-Steve