Subject: Re: [RFC suggestion] Generate manpage directly with Asciidoctor

From: "brian m. carlson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 May 2021 23:14:01 +0000

On 2021-05-11 at 04:27:54, Felipe Contreras wrote:
> I've never understood developers worried about how the bleeding edge
> would build in ancient platforms, when ancient platforms don't care
> about the bleeding edge.

Debian stable is a common environment to do development on.  I know
people who do use it for Git development, so I suspect we'll want to
continue to support it.  In fact, most of my colleagues who use a Debian
system for development use Debian stable, I'd say.

Moreover, in some cases, the distros one can use for development are
restricted due to requirements for software that runs on corporate
machines, so making things work nicely on the latest stable versions of
Debian and Ubuntu is generally kind.

Yes, people _can_ run "gem install asciidoctor", but people who are not
Ruby developers generally would prefer a distro package over installing
one-off gems, especially since getting the binaries into PATH is tricky
with gem.

> > It's not too hard to install an updated gem, but not quite as nice as
> > using the system package (it also makes things weird for building the
> > stable Debian package itself, which would want to rely only on other
> > packages; but of course any proposed change to the doc toolchain would
> > be for new versions, and would not get backported there anyway).
> 
> Anyone trying to build git master on top of Debian stable 1. probably
> can live with the output of the current doc toolchain, and 2. probably
> doesn't exist.

I believe I have just demonstrated that 2 is false above.

> > > I think what I'm arguing for is
> > > 
> > >   1) switch the default to asciidoctor,
> > >   2) enable optionally using it without xmlto,
> > >   3) figure out what broke and fix it, and document which is the minimum
> > >      asciidoctor version we're going to bother with for (2),
> > >   4) lather, rinse, repeat (3),
> > >   5) switch the default to not using xmlto,
> > >   6) drop the xmlto way of generating the manpages(?).
> > 
> > I'm unclear when support for python asciidoc goes away here. Is it part
> > of step 6 (because it does not have another way of generating them)? Or
> > does it live on forever as a non-default legacy system? I'd prefer not,
> > but as long as we are clear about the primary target and leave it up to
> > people interested in the legacy to do the compat fixes, that might be
> > OK.
> 
> How about we leave the legacy system in place as an alternative, and
> decide later what to do with it?

I think it would be fine to just leave it in place for now and let
people decide which toolchain they'd like to use.
-- 
brian m. carlson (he/him or they/them)
Houston, Texas, US