On Wed, 16 Feb 2022 16:45:25 -0700 Jonathan Corbet <corbet@xxxxxxx> wrote: > Some overall thoughts: > > - Work like this needs to be broken up into digestible batches. Let's > start with the POD stuff that I've (finally) commented on; other > stuff can come later. I will prepare the POD part. As for the rest, you will need a porter if you decide this is the way to go. I could help with explanations if something is unclear and as long as the questions come soon. The winter is almost over and I need to switch to other activities like earning money. > - The coding style in the new work is very unkernellike; that will make > it harder to get this work merged. Yes. I can only add a thought: it seems unnatural to me to have the same style for various languages. > - But let's take a step back and ask: why are we doing all of this work > in the first place? What is the benefit to the kernel community from > all this churn, and a growth of the kernel-doc script by over 2,000 > lines (even if an awful lot of them are blank)? My motivation was just climbing this mountain, nothing else. I don't even know, how important this script is to whom. I can only guess. Neither am I a C programmer, nor want to become one. So this question is to another part of the community. I could though think of the benefits to the maintainers. In this respect I've moved things forward quite a bit, I gather. As for the blank lines, they are just one character each and trivial to get rid of. > I'm serious about that last question; do we really want to invest that > kind of effort into this nasty old script? Or, if we're going to do > such a thing, should we maybe start with Markus's rewrite into Python > instead? If we're going to thrash the code and make it unrecognizable, > perhaps we should move to a language that is consistent with the rest of > the docs build system and which, I believe, is easier for more kernel > developers to deal with? I understand. I didn't know there was a rewrite. I'm not into Python, but if you could post a link, I'd take a look out of curiosity. If the community prefers Python, what can I say about this? Their choice. Personally, I'd rather play with translating this script to Raku (aka Perl 6). I also wonder, how Perl 5 will transition to Perl 7. A question to Perl experts. > I am *not* saying that this work cannot be accepted, and I certainly do > not want to alienate somebody who is actually able to look at kernel-doc > and not have their eyes bleed out. But I am saying that, before > launching into a hundreds-of-patches journey, we should know where we're > going and why we are doing it. I agree. > See what I'm getting at? Yes. Thanks. Tomasz
