Re: [PATCH] git-merge-tree.txt: replace spurious HTML entity

[Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Mar 4, 2023 at 4:27 PM Elijah Newren <newren@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Sat, Mar 4, 2023 at 9:48 AM Andreas Schwab <schwab@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Andreas Schwab <schwab@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> > ---
> >  Documentation/git-merge-tree.txt | 2 +-
> >  1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
> >
> > diff --git a/Documentation/git-merge-tree.txt b/Documentation/git-merge-tree.txt
> > index 88ee942101..ffc4fbf7e8 100644
> > --- a/Documentation/git-merge-tree.txt
> > +++ b/Documentation/git-merge-tree.txt
> > @@ -108,7 +108,7 @@ This is an integer status followed by a NUL character.  The integer status is:
> >
> >       0: merge had conflicts
> >       1: merge was clean
> > -     &lt;0: something prevented the merge from running (e.g. access to repository
> > +     <0: something prevented the merge from running (e.g. access to repository
> >          objects denied by filesystem)
>
> I'm sure I'm the one who put it there, but I don't remember any
> details.  I think it unlikely I would have jumped to '&lt;' without
> trying '<' and hitting an error first, though maybe I really did.
> Also, there could have been other edits since then; perhaps this was
> only needed when other characters appeared later on the line?  Or
> maybe the '&lt;' is only needed by asciidoc and not asciidoctor (or
> vice versa; I have no clue which I was using)?  Should we add a
> "lessthan" field in Documentation/asciidoc.conf under "[attributes]"
> and use "{lessthan}"?

For what it's worth I checked with both asciidoc and asciidoctor in
multiple output formats and < works fine. I even checked an ancient
version of asciidoc and it works fine.

It doesn't seem like &lt; was ever needed, and it doesn't work because
it's a literal section.

> Or, if this one really is spurious, should the same html entity in
> Documentation/git-rev-list.txt be expunged as well?

<= is automatically replaced with ⇐ as explained in the documentation
[1]. However, to prevent substitutions one doesn't need HTML coding,
just doing \<= is enough.

I don't know why people try to guess what asciidoc and asciidoctor
should do, they both follow the same specification, and I haven't seen
a problem in git documentation caused by either one of them not
following the spec, only by git not following the spec.

Just follow the spec.

Cheers.

[1] https://docs.asciidoctor.org/asciidoc/latest/syntax-quick-reference/

-- 
Felipe Contreras