[PATCH v2 0/4] Rewrite the top-level index.rst

Jonathan Corbet
2022-09-22T20:42:02Z

The top-level index.rst file is the entry point for the kernel's
documentation, especially for readers of the HTML output. It is currently
a mess containing everything we thought to throw in there. Firefox says it
would require 26 pages of paper to print it. That is not a user-friendly
introduction.

This series aims to improve our documentation entry point with a focus on
rewriting index.rst. The result is, IMO, simpler and more approachable.
For anybody who wants to see the rendered results without building the
docs, have a look at:

https://static.lwn.net/kerneldoc/

Those pages are rendered with the "Book" theme, which pays attention to the
html_sidebar directive. I am not proposing a switch to that theme (I just
picked it at random), but I do think we should reconsider the default theme
at some point - or just create our own theme.

This is only a beginning; I think this kind of organizational effort has to
be pushed down into the lower layers of the docs tree itself. But one has
to start somewhere.

CHANGES from v1: I've tried to address the comments from v1, further
cleaning up the front page. I've added the "reporting issues" and "kernel
testing" documents there, and done a bit of cleanup. There is plenty more
yet to be done.

Unless I get screams I plan to slip this into 6.1. It is definitely not
the final form of the front page, but I doubt we'll ever get there; we can
change it in whatever ways make sense.

Jonathan Corbet (7):
docs: promote the title of process/index.html
docs: Rewrite the front page
docs: reconfigure the HTML left column
docs: remove some index.rst cruft
docs: move asm-annotations.rst into core-api
docs: Expand the front-page CPU-architecture section
docs: put atomic*.txt and memory-barriers.txt into the core-api book

Documentation/conf.py | 3 +-
.../{ => core-api}/asm-annotations.rst | 7 +-
Documentation/core-api/index.rst | 4 +
.../core-api/wrappers/atomic_bitops.rst | 18 ++
Documentation/core-api/wrappers/atomic_t.rst | 19 +++
.../core-api/wrappers/memory-barriers.rst | 18 ++
Documentation/index.rst | 154 ++++++------------
Documentation/process/index.rst | 1 +
Documentation/staging/index.rst | 42 -----
Documentation/subsystem-apis.rst | 58 +++++++
10 files changed, 172 insertions(+), 152 deletions(-)
rename Documentation/{ => core-api}/asm-annotations.rst (97%)
create mode 100644 Documentation/core-api/wrappers/atomic_bitops.rst
create mode 100644 Documentation/core-api/wrappers/atomic_t.rst
create mode 100644 Documentation/core-api/wrappers/memory-barriers.rst
create mode 100644 Documentation/subsystem-apis.rst

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2.37.2