Re: Minor RST rant

NeilBrown
2020-07-24T23:47:06Z

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On Fri, Jul 24 2020, Steven Rostedt wrote:

> On Fri, 24 Jul 2020 11:33:25 -0600
> Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net> wrote:
>
>> Give people a tool, some of them will make more use of it than you might
>> like. I do my best to push back against excessive markup (which all of the
>> above qualifies as, as far as I'm concerned), but I can't really even do
>> that will all that goes through my tree, much less all the docs stuff
>> merged by others.
>>
>> The markup in question was seemingly added by Neil; I've added him to CC
>> in case he wants to comment on it.
>
> I saw Neil as the author and should have Cc'd him.
>
> Neil, you can read my full email here:
>
> https://lore.kernel.org/r/20200724132200.51fd2065@oasis.local.home
>
>>
>> I'm not sure what to do other than to continue to push for minimal use of
>> intrusive markup.
>
> Yeah, I really didn't expect an action item to come from this. It was
> just some feedback, and perhaps you can use this as an example of "too
> much markup" when dealing with others.
>
> Looking at the web page that Matthew pointed out to, does make it much
> easier to read. But one still needs to remember that a large audience
> of this work is still those of us that will read the plain text.
>
> My viewer of choice is "less" ;-)
>
> -- Steve

Hi Steven,
thanks for your rants - and under appreciated art form I believe.

Short answer is: I don't much care and if someone were to remove the
markup, I possibly wouldn't even notice and certainly wouldn't object.

Longer answer is that I think visual appearance is important. I
originally wrote that document as an article for lwn.net. I wanted the
code fragments - even when a single word like AT_EMPTY_PATH - to be
rendered like code (constant-width font). The markdown markup for that
is `code goes here`, so that is what I sent to Jon (he graciously uses
a markdown-to-html tool to munge what I send), and that is what I
placed in Documentation.
I subsequently converted this to rst (7bbfd9ad8eb2) which involved
converting single ` to double ``.
I agree this was not an improvement when reading the text, but maybe
that is the price of using rst. Or maybe the price is not being able
to say what you mean.

A brief look over the file suggests that most uses of `` are to
highlight one of:
- paths
- function names
- constant names.

All these must be used widely throughout the documentation - whatever
is the common standard should definitely be imposed.
Constant names stand out least effectively by themselves. In
kernel-doc comments they are preceded by a '%'. Would that make the
text more readable for you? Does our doc infrastructure honour that in
.rst documents?

Thanks,
NeilBrown

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