Re: "docs: stop using asciidoc no-inline-literal" breaks asciidoc 8.2.5

["Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason" <avarab@gmail.com>]

On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 2:03 PM, Thomas Rast <trast@inf.ethz.ch> wrote:
> Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Jeff King's 6cf378f0cbe7c7f944637892caeb9058c90a185a broke my Git
>> build on CentOS 5.5. The patch suggests that it only breaks
>> compatibility with asciidoc 7 but that isn't actually the case.
>
> The commit message of 6cf378f0 is not correct in that respect.  My
> ancient 71c020c5 has the right numbers: asciidoc 8.4.1 is the one that
> introduced the new inline-literal behavior.  Based on my little survey
> in
>
>  http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/191738/focus=191790
>
> we decided that "nobody" really uses such an old asciidoc any more.
> Evidently you are a counterexample.

Well, me and and others using current production RHEL releases:

    $ cat /etc/redhat-release && yum info asciidoc.noarch|grep Version
    CentOS release 5.5 (Final)
    Version    : 8.1.0
    $ cat /etc/redhat-release && yum info asciidoc.noarch|grep Version
    CentOS release 5.5 (Final)
    Version    : 8.2.5

I can't quite recall how I ended up with 8.2.5 on one of the boxes,
but it seems 8.1.0 may actually be the stock version.

>> I suggest just ejecting this patch and trying again, these RedHat
>> systems are still used in a lot of environments, especially by various
>> companies.
>
> Do you/they have to *build* the docs, as opposed to using the prebuilt
> ones coming from Junio?  Perhaps we can make it so 'make man' refuses to
> run if asciidoc is too old, and give a message to the effect that you
> should 'make quick-install-man' instead.
>
> Otherwise we'll be working around the f{asterisk}{asterisk}{asterisk}ing
> quoting rules for years to come.

I could personally change my build process to do something else, but
the reason I'm running "all doc" occasionally on this older toolchain
is to smoke out issues like these for other users on slightly older
toolchains as well.

I think it's too soon to break the stock toolchain on systems as
recent as RHEL 5.5 in the name of slightly nicer asciidoc syntax.

We could also keep the nice syntax and have some simple sed-based
pre-processor that converts the syntax to the older and more widely
supported version.

Or we could just decide to break RHEL 5 and systems released at a
similar time, but that isn't what the patch suggested it was doing, so
we should probably step back and ponder whether that's something we
want to do.

Personally I think having a hard dependency on a version of a software
package released more recently than 2007 (8.2.5 came out on
2007-11-18) is way too soon, it would be similar to breaking on a GCC
older than 4.2.0 which came out around the same time.