Subject: Re: Incorrect URL for Release Notes on git-scm

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Feb 2025 08:52:57 -0800

Christian Couder <[email-masked]> writes:

> Thanks for the details. We are transitioning from ".txt" to ".adoc"
> for the extension of many of our documentation files and this is
> perhaps triggering this issue.

Yup, that seems to be exactly what happened.  When we prepared the
transition, in https://lore.kernel.org/git/[email-masked]/
I said:

    Perhaps it may be enough keep the topic cooking a lot longer in
    'next' than usual one calendar week.  This of course requires that
    those on the creator side echosystem are paying attention to 'next',
    are capable of writing necessary adjustment (in my case, I would
    tweak my tooling so that it uses "$filename.$suffix" instead of
    hardcoded "txt" in the rest of the script, checks the presence of
    Documention/git.adoc to tweak suffix from default "txt") for their
    tooling, and can arrange to test their tooling with 'next'.

but apparently three weeks was not long enough for folks who are
maintaining the git-scm.com documentation machinery (or they were
not paying attention at all and even one year wouldn't have been
long enough X-<).

In any case, as I said earlier, Documentation/RelNotes/*.txt files
are never written as AsciiDoc (practically I am the only one who is
writing them) and are never processed and never meant to be
processed by the AsciiDoc/asciidoctor toolchain (I am not surprised
at all if stray punctuation letters I intended in a text document as
literal punctuation to be mistaken as AsciiDoc markups).

So from that point of view, it could be argued that we did not have
to rename them to .adoc suffix.

But I do not think it is a good direction to go in the longer term.
It may sweep this particular issue with a single link that the site
has into Documentation/RelNotes/ hierarchy under the rug, but it
forces everybody, including git-scm.com, to remember that everything
else in Documentation/ is ".adoc" but Documentation/RelNotes/ uses
".txt" as an exception when linking to our material.  And because
there is no guarantee that we will never update our documentation
model so that the release notes are really done as proper AsciiDoc
marked-up text someday, such a move will force the downstream users
to transition to ".adoc" eventually.

Thanks.