Re: [PATCH 0/6] scripts/kernel-doc: Kernel-doc improvements

[Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>]

On Mon,  7 Sep 2015 17:01:58 -0300
Danilo Cesar Lemes de Paula <danilo.cesar@collabora.co.uk> wrote:

> The following series contains:
>  * kernel-doc: markdown support and improvements.

OK, I've spent a while looking this stuff over.  I like the general idea,
but I do have a couple of concerns.

1 Installing pandoc on a Fedora system wants to drag in 70(!) packages
  for 100MB of total stuff.  Installing it on Arch is ... well ... enough
  to make you want to switch to Fedora.  If we add a dependency on a tool
  this massive, people are going to complain, loudly.

  Have you looked at using something like cmark instead?  I don't know
  the tool well, but it seems like it can do the job simply enough.  It's
  focused, written in C, and doesn't drag in a diskful of Haskell
  stuff.  There's lot of other converters out there too, I'm not tied to
  this one (though I think CommonMark deserves support), but I do think
  this question needs to be considered.

2 We're constructing an increasingly complicated document-processing
  mechanism with a lot of independently moving parts.  What if we
  converted the whole document to markdown and dispensed with the XML
  part altogether?  Making the source files simpler and dispensing with
  the xmlto requirement would be a big win, IMO.

I will not make #2 be a precondition to getting some form of this work
merged, but I would like to have a good answer for #1.  Adding such a
heavyweight dependency (even as an optional one) needs to have a pretty
good story behind it.

Thanks,

jon