Re: What's cooking in git.git (May 2020, #08; Sun, 24)

[Todd Zullinger <tmz@pobox.com>]

Hi,

Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Git 2.27-rc2 will be tagged soon, but most of the topics planned for
> it are already in 'master'.

There's a minor issue in the ss/faq-ignore topic which
breaks the doc build on CentOS/ RHEL 6 that was mentioned by
Son Luong Ngoc¹.  The "." in the anchor text causes an issue
for the older doc toolchain on these systems.

I included a simple patch for that in a reply².  I haven't
seen any discussion on it one way or another.  At the risk
of pestering, I thought I'd mention it in case it had just
flown under everyone's radar during this busy time.

On one hand, the doc build toolchain on CentOS / RHEL 6 is
old and those systems will be EOL at the end of November.
So we might find it acceptable to stop supporting the doc
build there.

On the other hand, the fix/workaround is quite trivial and
nearly imperceptible to readers of the documentation.  The
problematic "." in ".gitiginore" only appears in the anchor
link for HTML viewers or in the plain text for readers of
the .txt file:

    [[files-in-.gitignore-are-tracked]]

vs.

    [[files-in-gitignore-are-tracked]]

I'm not sure there's enough value in keeping the "." in this
case to justify breaking the doc build for users stuck on an
old CentOS / RHEL 6 system.

I think the risk of applying the patch is sufficiently low
that it would be worth including in 2.27.0.  That is, unless
there is a strong opinion that the "." is quite useful or
that even low effort isn't worth taking to support such an
old doc toolchain.

¹ https://lore.kernel.org/git/CAL3xRKdwOASiGys+7Uu_OA5kBPrTdAURfEw3UQ+rguTXT+C6JQ@mail.gmail.com/
² https://lore.kernel.org/git/20200519045301.GY24220@pobox.com/

Thanks,

-- 
Todd