Porting the Docs to Sphinx - project status

[Martin Liška]

On 2/4/22 14:40, Matthias Klose wrote:
> On 1/31/22 15:06, Martin Liška wrote:
>> Hello.
>>
>> It's about 5 months since the last project status update:
>> https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc-patches/2021-August/577108.html
>> Now it's pretty clear that it won't be merged before GCC 12.1 gets released.
>>
>> So where we are? I contacted documentation maintainers (Gerald, Sandra and
>> Joseph) at the
>> end of the year in a private email, where I pinged the patches. My take away is
>> that both
>> Gerald and Joseph are fine with the porting, while Sandra has some concerns.
>> Based on her
>> feedback, I was able to improve the PDF generated output significantly and I'm
>> pleased by the
>> provided feedback. That led to the following 2 Sphinx pulls requests that need
>> to be merged
>> before we can migrate the documentation: [1], [2].
>>
>> Since the last time I also made one more round of proofreading and the layout
>> was improved
>> (mainly for PDF part). Current version of the documentation can be seen here:
>> https://splichal.eu/scripts/sphinx/
>>
>> I would like to finish the transition once GCC 12.1 gets released in May/June
>> this year.
>> There are still some minor regressions, but overall the Sphinx-based
>> documentation should
>> be a significant improvement over what we've got right now.
>>
>> Please take this email as urgent call for a feedback!
> 
> Please take care about the copyrights.  I only checked the D frontend manual,
> and this one suddenly has a copyright with invariant sections, compared to the
> current gdc.texi which has a copyright *without* the invariant sections.  Debian
> doesn't allow me to ship documentation with invariant sections ...

Oh, thank you very much for the pointer. I didn't notice the Copyright sections
differ quite a lot. It should be fixed now.

> 
> I didn't look how much you reorganized the sources, but it would nice to split
> the files into those documenting command line options (used to generate the man
> pages) and other documentation.

Well, the current splitting is done into multiple .rst files and a bunch of them
actually constructs command line options. Please check View page source button
on each HTML page.

> This is already done for gcc/doc, but not for
> other frontends.  It would allow having manual pages with a copyright requiring
> front and back cover texts in the manual pages.

How exactly does it work? Does it mean you don't use official GCC tarballs?
I would expect you just package built man/info pages and don't distribute PDF/HTML
version of a documenation, or?

> 
> It would also be nice to require the latest sphinx version (and probably some
> plugins), so that distros can build the docs with older sphinx versions as well.

I'm sorry but this would be very difficult. It's mainly caused by fact I've reported
quite some changes to upstream, where having them leads to a reasonable HTML/PDF output.

Note you can quite easily utilize pip&virtualenv for Sphinx installation.

Cheers,
Martin

> 
> Matthias