Re: [RFC suggestion] Generate manpage directly with Asciidoctor

["brian m. carlson" <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>]

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On 2021-05-07 at 06:06:31, Bagas Sanjaya wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Asciidoctor has support for directly generating manpage, see [1].
> 
> We support using Asciidoctor as drop-in replacement for original
> Asciidoc, but currently we need to use xmlto together with Asciidoc(tor)
> to produce manpages. However, most users don't inclined to install
> xmlto toolchain, partly because they had to download more than 300 MB
> of data just to install xmlto and its dependencies (including dblatex
> and texlive).

If you're installing on Debian, you want to install with
--no-install-recommends to avoid the dependency on dblatex or fop,
libpaper-utils, and zip.  That should avoid the large downloads.

> So completely migrating to Asciidoctor can eliminate xmlto requirement
> for generating manpage.
> 
> What do you think about above?

I didn't do this because it makes things very complicated in the
Makefile and my goal was to minimize the needed changes and divergence.
I'm not opposed to someone else doing it, but I expect it will be a
bunch of work.

It also doesn't help if you're generating more than just the manual
pages, since generating the PDFs will definitely require xmlto and
either dblatex or fop.  I personally prefer fop over dblatex, but folks
have different opinions.
-- 
brian m. carlson (he/him or they/them)
Houston, Texas, US

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