Re: Kernel docs: muddying the waters a bit

From: Grant Likely
Date: Wed Apr 27 2016 - 10:29:08 EST


On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 4:46 PM, Jonathan Corbet <corbet@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Fri, 8 Apr 2016 17:12:27 +0200
> Markus Heiser <markus.heiser@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> motivated by this MT, I implemented a toolchain to migrate the kernelâs
>> DocBook XML documentation to reST markup.
>>
>> It converts 99% of the docs well ... to gain an impression how
>> kernel-docs could benefit from, visit my sphkerneldoc project page
>> on github:
>>
>> http://return42.github.io/sphkerneldoc/
>
> So I've obviously been pretty quiet on this recently. Apologies...I've
> been dealing with an extended death-in-the-family experience, and there is
> still a fair amount of cleanup to be done.
>
> Looking quickly at this work, it seems similar to the results I got. But
> there's a lot of code there that came from somewhere? I'd put together a
> fairly simple conversion using pandoc and a couple of short sed scripts;
> is there a reason for a more complex solution?
>
> Thanks for looking into this, anyway; I hope to be able to focus more on
> it shortly.

Hi Jon,

Thanks for digging into this. FWIW, here is my $0.02. I've been
working on restarting the devicetree specification, and after looking
at both reStructuredText and Asciidoc(tor) I thought I liked the
Asciidoc markup better, so chose that. I then proceeded to spend weeks
trying to get reasonable output from the toolchain. When I got fed up
and gave Sphinx a try, I was up and running with reasonable PDF and
HTML output in a day and a half.

Honestly, in the end I think we could make either tool do what is
needed of it. However, my impression after trying to do a document
that needs to have nice publishable output with both tools is that
Sphinx is easier to work with, simpler to extend, better supported. My
vote is firmly behind Sphinx/reStructuredText.

g.