Re: [PATCH 0/6] Doc: drop support for docbook-xsl before 1.74

From: "brian m. carlson" <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
To: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Cc: "Martin Ågren" <martin.agren@gmail.com>,
	git@vger.kernel.org, "Junio C Hamano" <gitster@pobox.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/6] Doc: drop support for docbook-xsl before 1.74
Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2020 00:45:33 +0000
Message-ID: <20200402004533.GA6369@camp.crustytoothpaste.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20200401101716.GC60227@coredump.intra.peff.net>

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On 2020-04-01 at 10:17:16, Jeff King wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 31, 2020 at 09:26:00PM +0200, Martin Ågren wrote:
> 
> > But most importantly: When I looked into the history, I came upon
> > c2a7f5d438 ("docs: monospace listings in docbook output", 2012-08-07),
> > which made me worry about breaking "make info". On second thought, I
> > might have broken it many times already over the past few years, since
> > I've never built the info. So maybe worrying about that all of a sudden
> > is a bit unfounded in a way. :-/
> > 
> > (I tried to build "info" while working on this. It works in the sense
> > that it doesn't error out, but I don't get anything that looks remotely
> > useful. I've never used info at all though, to be honest, so could be
> > missing something fundamental.)
> 
> I don't find "info" useful, either. The big thing it offers over "man"
> is actual hyperlinks, but linkgit attributes (the only thing we actually
> bother annotating) don't seem to actually become links! These days I'd
> expect most people interested in hyperlinking to just use HTML.  I
> wouldn't be surprised if there's some emacs integration with info,
> though, so maybe people use it there. I dunno. I'd be happy to see all
> of the info bits go away.

I believe Emacs does have good integration with the info format.  I
personally prefer documentation in almost any other format and would
also be happy to see it go away, but Emacs users may find it convenient.

Junio, I believe you use Emacs.  Do you have an opinion on whether, on
the whole, Emacs users are likely to make good use of the info
documentation?

> I've add brian to the cc, since he was the last person to touch texi
> stuff (though he may have just been doing it out of a sense of
> cleanup/duty).

I clearly see the commit in the history with my name on it and the
explanation seems like something I might have written, but I have no
recollection of touching that code or writing the patch at all.  I very
likely only touched it because I felt compelled not to introduce a
regression (although, as you mentioned, I failed).

> The .texi generated for the user-manual is the same before and after
> your patch, so I think it's OK to do.
> 
> There _is_ an older regression in the user-manual, though. After commit
> 03920ac69b (asciidoctor: fix user-manual to be built by `asciidoctor`,
> 2017-01-02), the whole front-matter is missing from the generated
> "git.info" file, and there's a funky ": idm4" node. Nobody seems to have
> noticed or complained since then (though perhaps people are more likely
> to look at the manpages than the user manual).

If nobody seems to care very much for the info documentation, we could
drop it.  I've put a query out on Twitter to see if anyone I know is
using it.
-- 
brian m. carlson: Houston, Texas, US
OpenPGP: https://keybase.io/bk2204

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