[PATCH 0/5] Fortran manual updates

Martin Liška mliska@suse.cz
Thu Nov 4 10:04:52 GMT 2021


On 11/2/21 16:56, Sandra Loosemore wrote:
> On 11/2/21 9:20 AM, Martin Liška wrote:
>> On 11/2/21 15:48, Sandra Loosemore wrote:
>>> On 11/2/21 2:51 AM, Martin Liška wrote:
>>>> On 11/2/21 00:56, Sandra Loosemore wrote:
>>>>> I'll wait a couple days before committing these patches, in case
>>>>> anybody wants to give some feedback, especially on technical issues.
>>>>
>>>> Hello.
>>>>
>>>> Appreciate the work you did, but the patchset will cause quite some conflicts
>>>> in the prepared Sphinx migration patch I've sent to the mailing list :/
>>>> Anyway, I will rebase my patches. For the future, are you planning doing similar
>>>> documentation reorganization for a manual? Based on discussion with Gerald, I hope
>>>> we can finish the transition before the end of this year.
>>>
>>> My understanding was that, if this conversion is indeed going to happen, it's going to be automated by scripts?
>>
>> Exactly, but the conversion needs some manual post-processing that I've already done.
>>
>>>   I hadn't seen any discussion of it on the list for months and thought the whole idea was on hold or scrapped, since it hasn't happened yet.
>>
>> There was almost no response, so that's why I contacted Gerald about help.
> 
> I have to admit that I was buried in technical work at the time of the previous discussion (in fact, the Fortran things I am now trying to document), and didn't have time to look at the proposed changes in any detail.  I have wondered, though, why it's necessary to do this change....  if people don't like the way Texinfo formats output, can't we fix Texinfo?

That's a reasonable question. Well, I believe the technical dept (feature set) of Texinfo (compared to more modern tools) is significant and I don't want
to spend my time hacking a HTML, Javascipt and so on. Moreover, Sphinx is massively used: https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/examples.html
and the tool is actively developed.


> Or hack it to translate the sources to something like DocBook instead, and then adopt that as our source format?  I can write documentation in any markup format, but it seems to me that structured XML-based formats are a lot more amenable to scripted manipulation than either Texinfo or restructured text.  If the rest of the community is set on Sphinx, I'm fine with that, but I kind of don't see the point, myself.  :-S

We think with David that DocBook is too complicated and a markup is a better choice (from that perspective, Texinfo is fine).

> 
>>> In any case it does not seem reasonable to freeze the current Texinfo docs for months while waiting for it to happen, especially as we are heading into the end of the release cycle and people are finishing up changes and new features they need to document.
>>
>> Sure, I can easily rebase normal changes, but you are suggesting a complete redesign/renaming. It's going to take me some time,
>> but I'll rebase my patches.
> 
> Well, what I've done is hardly a "complete" redesign/renaming of the Fortran manual -- I've barely scratched the surface on it.  My main goal was just to update the bit-rotten standards conformance sections, which were unfortunately spread among multiple places in the document.  I did consolidate those few sections, but I did not make any big-picture changes to the organization of the manual, and I have not even reviewed any other parts of it for accuracy or relevance.  I'd been thinking about making a pass to do some copy-editing things, like making sure all chapter/section titles use consistent title case capitalization, but I will hold off on that if it's going to cause problems.

I see, thanks for doing that.

Martin

> 
> -Sandra



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