Re: Git and Documentation

[Michael Witten <mfwitten@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 15:47, Michael Witten <mfwitten@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 15:31, Tomas Carnecky <tom@dbservice.com> wrote:
>> If the documentation is generated as part of the build, then there is no
>> reason to have it part of the history - you can always rebuild it from
>> the source. For the same reason you don't put compiled source into git.
>
> Well, theoretically.
>
> According to:
>
>  http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git;a=blob_plain;f=MaintNotes;hb=todo
>
> the git project's repository itself tracks generated documentation for
> practical reasons:
>
>  The "html" and "man" [branches] are
>  autogenerated documentation from the
>  tip of the "master" branch; the tip
>  of "html" is extracted to be visible
>  at kernel.org at:
>
>    http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/
>

I should add that generating documentation is time consuming and often
requires brittle software; there's a lot to gain by having one system
produce the same output for virtually everyone else.