Re: Kernel docs: muddying the waters a bit

[Keith Packard]

Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> On my tests, Sphinix seemed too limited to format tables. Asciidoc
> produced an output that worked better.

Yes, asciidoc has much more flexibility in table formatting, including
the ability to control text layout within cells and full control over
borders.

However, I think asciidoc has two serious problems:

  1) the python version (asciidoc) appears to have been abandoned in
     favor of the ruby version. 

  2) It really is just a docbook pre-processor. Native html/latex output
     is poorly supported at best, and exposes only a small subset of the
     full capabilities of the input language.

As such, we would have to commit to using the ruby version and either
committing to fixing the native html output backend or continuing to use
the rest of the docbook toolchain.

We could insist on using the python version, of course. I spent a bit of
time hacking that up to add 'real' support for a table-of-contents in
the native HTML backend and it looks like getting those changes
upstreamed would be reasonably straightforward. However, we'd end up
'owning' the code, and I'm not sure we want to.

-- 
-keith

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