On Sun, 6 Aug 2017 21:56:12 -0700 Josh Triplett <josh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I'm not sure > why the kernel picked reStructuredText, but I don't think there's likely > to be a huge amount of cross-pollination between the two in terms of > documentation. To address the "why the kernel picked RST" question, in case anybody's curious... We looked hard at MD, AsciiDoc, and RST; indeed, there were patches in circulation for both MD and AsciiDoc before RST even entered the picture. In the end RST won out because: - It allows the creation of large, integrated, multi-file documents. Every MD file is a world unto itself, and AsciiDoc is about the same. RST lets us put in nice things like global indexes and cross-references. - Some people want to do fancy tables. It was argued that AsciiDoc is actually the best here; MD is not. - RST is actively developed and widely used. AsciiDoc looks stale; MD is actively developed in a large number of mostly compatible variants. - Production of numerous output formats without the need for obnoxious toolchains. This, alas, turned out not to be true for PDF output; if your docs are simpler, though, you might be able to use rst2pdf and avoid a lot of pain. - RST has a nice extension mechanism that makes it easy for us to add our own functionality. ...and probably something else I forgot. (I'm not arguing that sparse should or should not use RST, BTW, just answering Josh's implied question for the kernel). jon -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-sparse" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
