Re: [RFC suggestion] Generate manpage directly with Asciidoctor

["Martin Ågren" <martin.agren@gmail.com>]

On Sun, 9 May 2021 at 20:46, Felipe Contreras
<felipe.contreras@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Are there some minimal requirements to say; this documentation was
> built correctly (as far as we know)? If so, maybe we can add a
> checker, or perhaps add a test under t/.

There's `make check-doc` which does some linting. But that's about
checking that there's a manpage at all for each builtin, that the doc
sources list sections in the right order, and such things. It doesn't
actually build the docs.

ci/test-documentation.sh runs `make check-doc` (see above), then goes on
to actually build the docs using both asciidoc and asciidoctor.  It
checks the exit status, but also that stderr is empty after filtering
out some expected, harmless output.

I think that's about the right balance. We could perhaps do something
under t/, but it probably shouldn't be to actually build the stuff. More
like, "oh, you've built the documentation -- let me sanity-check it for
you".  One way to detect that it makes sense to check it might be to see
if the Git version in the manpage footer(s) matches the version under
test. But I don't know what to check next.  (Actually, if we do find the
version number there, we have verified a fairly tricky piece of content
injection. At least "tricky" as in "we have more than one way of doing
it, because we support more than one toolchain" [1]. And if that stuff
broke, the test wouldn't notice, if we relied on detecting a version
match to even start testing...)

[1] See 7a30134358 ("asciidoctor-extensions: provide `<refmiscinfo/>`",
2019-09-16) and its parent commit.

Martin