From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1758081AbcCCPRN (ORCPT ); Thu, 3 Mar 2016 10:17:13 -0500 Received: from tex.lwn.net ([70.33.254.29]:34023 "EHLO vena.lwn.net" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751247AbcCCPRL (ORCPT ); Thu, 3 Mar 2016 10:17:11 -0500 Date: Thu, 3 Mar 2016 08:17:09 -0700 From: Jonathan Corbet To: One Thousand Gnomes Cc: Jani Nikula , LKML , linux-doc@vger.kernel.org, Keith Packard , Daniel Vetter , Mauro Carvalho Chehab , Hans Verkuil , linux-media@vger.kernel.org, Graham Whaley Subject: Re: Kernel docs: muddying the waters a bit Message-ID: <20160303081709.5907bcd8@lwn.net> In-Reply-To: <20160303143425.2361dea2@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> References: <20160213145317.247c63c7@lwn.net> <87y49zr74t.fsf@intel.com> <20160303071305.247e30b1@lwn.net> <20160303143425.2361dea2@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> Organization: LWN.net MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Thu, 3 Mar 2016 14:34:25 +0000 One Thousand Gnomes wrote: > We only have docbook because it was the tool of choice rather a lot of > years ago to then get useful output formats. It was just inherited when > borrowed the original scripts from Gnome/Gtk. It's still the most > effective way IMHO of building big structured documents out of the kernel. ...except that we haven't used it that way. Instead, we make a whole bunch of smaller, partially structured document silos. > The Gtk people long ago rewrote the original document script into a real > tool so they have some different and maintained tools that are close to > equivalent and already have some markdown support. Before we go off and > re-invent the wheel it might be worth just borrowing their wheel and > tweaking it as needed ? In particular they can generate help indexes so > that the entire output becomes nicely browsable with an HTML based help > browser. Well, not inventing the wheel was kind of the motivation behind much of this effort; I got kind of worried watching us trying to cobble more functionality into our existing house-of-cards documentation system. Sphinx is a well-established, heavily used, and well supported system; using it would not be an exercise in wheel reinvention. As far as I can tell, it does everything we need (with some open questions about table support), lets us drop the whole DocBook toolchain dependency, and move to a much better-supported setup than we have now. Plus we get much nicer output, index generation, cross-references between documents, and the ability to write documents in a lightweight markup language. Seems like a win. I assume you're referring to gtk-doc? It's web page (http://www.gtk.org/gtk-doc/) starts by noting that it's "a bit awkward to setup and use"; they recommend looking at Doxygen instead. So I guess I'm not really sure what it offers that merits throwing another option into the mix now? What am I missing? Thanks, jon