Re: [PATCH 10/57] docs: device-mapper: convert it to ReST format

Mike Snitzer
2019-04-16T15:49:05Z

On Tue, Apr 16 2019 at 10:00am -0400,
Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net> wrote:

> On Tue, 16 Apr 2019 09:28:52 -0400
> Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> > Can you help me understand why this is the direction text based
> > Documenation is taking in the Linux kernel? All I see is markup, and
> > escaping of characters, that is a chore to administer over time.
>
> This is a discussion that was mostly resolved some years ago...
>
> Classic Documentation/ is a jumbled collection of unorganized text files,
> some of which contain highly useful information and others of which
> haven't had much to offer since about 1996. We are working to turn it
> into an organized collection where, hopefully, some thought has actually
> been given to the people who will be reading it.
>
> The ReST conversion, in particular, allows us to link documents into a
> larger structure, create indexes and cross references, and produce output
> in formats like HTML and PDF. It lets us present the documentation like
> this:
>
> https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
>
> Among other things, making the documentation more accessible in this way
> makes it easier and more rewarding for developers to improve it, and I
> believe we are seeing the results of that. Linus called out the
> documentation work in the 5.1-rc1 announcement, for example.
>
> Nobody has complained about the maintenance burden of RST docs - so far as
> I have heard, anyway. Things do break occasionally, but problems in the
> docs build almost always result from code changes that mess up the
> kerneldoc comments rather than RST changes, and it's been that way for as
> long as I've been paying attention.

Thanks for the context. I clearly just haven't followed the evolution.
Certainly looks like a solid improvement.

Think the last piece I'm missing is: how does one edit a .rst document
without having to know to sprinkle syntactic sugar around? Does emacs
have a ReST mode? If not what client interface are people using to
properly change these documents?

(apologies if this is all spelled out nicely in Documentation/
somewhere, but please help this man learn to fish).

Thanks,
Mike