Re: [PATCH 5/5] drm: Enable markdown^Wasciidoc for gpu.tmpl

From: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
To: Daniel Vetter <daniel@ffwll.ch>
Cc: Graham Whaley <graham.whaley@linux.intel.com>,
	Daniel Vetter <daniel.vetter@ffwll.ch>,
	Intel Graphics Development <intel-gfx@lists.freedesktop.org>,
	DRI Development <dri-devel@lists.freedesktop.org>,
	Thomas Wood <thomas.wood@intel.com>,
	Dave Airlie <airlied@redhat.com>,
	Daniel Vetter <daniel.vetter@intel.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 5/5] drm: Enable markdown^Wasciidoc for gpu.tmpl
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2016 18:12:12 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20160111181212.58eae320@lwn.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20151212111345.GY20822@phenom.ffwll.local>

On Sat, 12 Dec 2015 12:13:45 +0100
Daniel Vetter <daniel@ffwll.ch> wrote:

> I just figured there's no way this could get it, and I'd
> much rather improve the docs themselves than trying to convince core
> kernel folks that this might be useful.

So I'm not quite sure why you figured that; I never said it, certainly.

I've been messing with it a bit, seems to work.  I do still wish we could
consider alternatives, especially those that might simplify the toolchain
rather than complicating it.  But it's clear that I'm not succeeding in
finding time to actually explore that idea; the contents of $EXCUSES are
good, but the end result is the same.  And the patch fairy just isn't
coming through for me on this one.

In my mind, there's clearly no good that can come from (further) delaying
something that works in favor of an "it would be nice" that may never
even exist.  So I'm currently thinking that I'll pull this into the docs
tree once the merge window is done, with the plan to push it for 4.6.
Then we can see if anybody screams.

That gives a couple of weeks for an updated patch set, should you have
one.

The build-time increase is painful in the extreme - about a factor of
three for a -j1 build, and that's with only one file using the feature.
It feels wrong, somehow, for the docs build to take longer than building
the kernel itself.  Can we do something about that?

 - How many of the comments actually use asciidoc features?  Might there
   be some possibility of detecting those in kernel-doc and skipping the
   callout to asciidoc when it's not needed?

 - Pandoc seems to do asciidoc.  I still don't like the idea of depending
   on it for this to work, but having the *option* to use it is fine.  If
   it's really that much faster (yes, Python startup is painful) then
   maybe providing the option is worth it.

 - All over the kernel we've seen that batching improves performance.  It
   would take a bit of work, but I bet kernel-doc could put together all
   the snippets from one file, pass them through a single asciidoc
   invocation, then split the results back apart.  That would probably
   eliminate the performance hit entirely.

None of that is a condition for pulling this stuff in, but can it be
looked into?

Thanks,

jon
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