Re: [PATCH 04/36] mutex, futex: adjust kernel-doc markups to generate ReST

[Darren Hart <dvhart@infradead.org>]

On Mon, May 15, 2017 at 01:49:19PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Mon, May 15, 2017 at 01:29:58PM +0300, Jani Nikula wrote:
> > On Mon, 15 May 2017, Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> wrote:
> > > The intention is to aid readability. Making comments worse so that some
> > > retarded script can generate better html or whatnot is just that,
> > > retarded.
> > >
> > > Code matters, generated documentation not so much. I'll take a comment
> > > that reads well over one that generates pretty html any day.
> > 
> > The deal is that if you start your comments with "/**" they'll be
> > processed with the retarded script to produce pretty html.
> > 
> > For the most part the comments that generate pretty html also read well,
> > and we don't expect or want anyone to go overboard with markup. I don't
> > think it's unreasonable to make small concessions to improve generated
> > documentation for people who care about it even if you don't.
> 
> No. Such a concession has pure negative value. It opens the door to more
> patches converting this or that comment to be prettier or whatnot. And
> before you know it there's a Markus like idiot spamming you with dozens
> of crap patches to prettify the generated crud.

Well that I can certainly understand.

> 
> Not to mention that this would mean having to learn this rest crud in
> order to write these comments.

I have complete confidence in you here Peter :-b

> 
> All things I'm not prepared to do.
> 
> 
> I'm all for useful comments, but I see no value _at_all_ in this
> generated nonsense. The only reason I sometimes use the docbook comment
> style is because its fairly uniform and the build bot gets you a warning
> when your function signature no longer matches with the comment. But
> if you make this painful I'll simply stop using them.
> 

Making documentation more accessible to people is a good thing. This type of
automated publication reduces the barrier to access. The lack of this kind of
tooling, honestly, also discourages participation among some groups of
of capable contributors.

That said, I support the direction both Mauro and Peter have voiced to minimize
the impact to comment blocks. What does rest do with this formatting it doesn't
understand - does it fail gracefully? Falling back to <verbatim> or something
like that?

-- 
Darren Hart
VMware Open Source Technology Center