On 2019-09-03 at 18:51:19, Martin Ågren wrote:
> Almost half a year ago, I wrote:
> > To be clear. *This* patch has a sufficiently incorrect commit message
> > that it really needs a makeover. You can expect a v2.
> 
> Finally, here's that v2. I should probably refresh memories: The goal of
> the main patch here is to make the headers and footers of our manpages
> built by Asciidoctor look a lot more like those generated by AsciiDoc.
> In particular, this gets rid of the ugly "[FIXME: source]".
> 
> I spent a little bit of time trying to work on the XML as XML, and
> quite a lot of time procrastinating on that. In the end, I decided that
> the outcome of my attempts wouldn't get better and that there is some
> value to the stupid approach from v1 of doing a simple search-and-replace
> in the text. I've preserved my attempts in the commit message.
> 
> When I posted v1, it turned into quite a thread [1] on AsciiDoc vs
> Asciidoctor vs Asciidoctor 2.0 and differences in rendering. (I am on
> Asciidoctor 1.5.5.)
> 
> Among other things, the v1-thread discussed switching the rendering
> toolchain entirely to avoid the detour over xmlto. Doing that would
> render this patch obsolete. While I agree that such a switch is the
> correct long-term goal and that we can be fairly aggressive about it, I
> do also think it makes sense to first make the "softer" switch to
> Asciidoctor-by-default and get that particular hurdle behind us. Then,
> once we're ok with dropping AsciiDoc entirely, we can do the switch to
> an Asciidoctor-only toolchain.

Yeah, this seems like a good approach.  xmlto is a neat tool, but it's
essentially unmaintained and is designed for DocBook 4.  Avoiding it
where possible seems like the right choice.

I looked at this series and it seems sane.  I agree that adding a
dependency on nokogiri isn't really desirable.  It is an extremely
common Ruby package, but it has native extensions, which causes problems
for some people if their distro doesn't support it.
-- 
brian m. carlson: Houston, Texas, US
OpenPGP: https://keybase.io/bk2204