On Thu, 3 Mar 2016 14:34:25 +0000 One Thousand Gnomes <gnomes@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-doc" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
