Re: [PATCH] cleanup: Add usage and style documentation

From: Dan Williams
Date: Sun Mar 24 2024 - 16:38:15 EST


Jonathan Corbet wrote:
> Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
>
> > Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> >> On Fri, Mar 22, 2024 at 12:10:38PM -0700, Dan Williams wrote:
> >> > Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> >> > > So I despise all that RST stuff. It makes what should be trivially
> >> > > readable text into a trainwreck. We're coders, we use text editors to
> >> > > read comments.
> >> >
> >> > Ok, I will rip out the RST stuff and just make this a standalone comment.
> >>
> >> I would rather you ignored Peter's persistent whining about RST and
> >> kept the formatting.
>
> Dealing with that is definitely the least pleasant part of trying to
> maintain docs...

What is Linux development if not a surprising ongoing discovery of one-off
local preferences?

FWIW, I think the ability to embed RST markup directly into source code
documentation is a slick mechanism. It is something I welcome into any
file I maintain. At the same time, for files I do not maintain,
maintainer deference indicates "jettison some markup syntax to move the
bigger picture forward".

> > Hmm, how about split the difference and teach scripts/kernel-doc to treat
> > Peter's preferred markup for a C code example as a synonym, i.e.
> > effectively a search and replace of a line with only:
> >
> > Ex.
> >
> > ...with:
> >
> > .. code-block:: c
> >
> > ...within a kernel-doc DOC: section?
>
> I'm not convinced that "Ex." is a clearer or more readable syntax, and
> I'd prefer to avoid adding to the regex hell that kernel-doc already is
> or adding more special syntax of our own. How about, as Lukas
> suggested, just using the "::" notation? You get a nice literal block,
> albeit without the syntax highlighting -- a worthwhile tradeoff, IMO.

Sounds reasonable to me, will do that for v2.

Lukas, thanks for the help!