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The Problem with Linux Kernel Documentation, and How We're Fixing It

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31–34 of 34 posts

Re: The Problem with Linux Kernel Documentation, and How We're Fixing It

#31
post #23
post #2

Happy to see they pick ReST over MD. ReST is vastly superior for these purposes, in my experience.

Mind explaining why? I like Markdown but would like to know what ReST does better.

One large difference is that Markdown exclusively targets HTML as an output format where ReST tries to be format agnostic. If you only ever target HTML this might ease some things but not if you want html, man pages, pdfs, plain text, …

Re: The Problem with Linux Kernel Documentation, and How We're Fixing It

#32
post #23
post #2

Happy to see they pick ReST over MD. ReST is vastly superior for these purposes, in my experience.

Mind explaining why? I like Markdown but would like to know what ReST does better.

ReST is a whole multi-document system, as opposed to MD which is just the formatting (at least before you mix in the dozens of mutually incompatible extensions). ReST is a superset.

Re: The Problem with Linux Kernel Documentation, and How We're Fixing It

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No reason it couldn't be both, I suppose.

Definitely the case in my office. A couple of opinionated and (relatively) senior devs that think the code is the documentation. No, I can't read this 40 yo fortran code and use it as the basis for a new program on a different architecture. It uses gotos and variables like "yxtgn" that mean nothing to the reader (turned out y meant it was an integer, weird). I spent a month on that because there was no documentation,…

> It uses gotos and variables like "yxtgn" that mean nothing to the reader (turned out y meant it was an integer, weird)

It meant "ynteger". Elementary, my dear Watson.

Re: The Problem with Linux Kernel Documentation, and How We're Fixing It

#34
post #25

They missed a format that's ubiquitous, has a lot of formatting options, and has search facilities. Manpages. When someone's looking for a piece of documentation, they are usually working on a system as they do it, and man -k is a lot easier to remember than some other search tool that requires its own set of packages, etc.

You can build man pages with Sphinx. http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/stable/builders.html

Have you actually tried to use this for something real? Sphinx source doesn't seem suited for man pages at all, and formatting seems the least important bit that doesn't fit.
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