Re: [libvirt] [PATCH 00/17] docs: remove all use of POD for man pages in favour of RST
On 12/6/19 9:50 AM, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
As part of the goal to eliminate Perl from libvirt, this gets rid of
the
use of POD format for man pages. There's nothing especially bad about
POD as a markup language compared to other lightweight markup languages
like RST or Markdown. It hasn't found widespread usage outside of the
Perl world though, and so switching from POD to RST brings a language
which likely has more familiarity to contributors.
This also nicely aligns with our use of RST of web pages, and indeed
in this series things are setup so that all the man pages get published
on the main libvirt.org website. Over time this will hopefuly draw
search engines traffic to libvirt.org instead of random 3rd party
websites hosting various out of date copies of the man pages.
Reviewing the individual RST files is likely a very unpleasant task,
especially the enourmous virsh man page. Most of the conversion work
was automated with pod2rst, followed by lots of editting to cleanup
its output. virsh had some further automated processing done to create
headers for each command.
It is probably more useful to review the rendered man page output
and/or websites to see that it looks sane when read.
Reviewed-by: Cole Robinson <crobinso(a)redhat.com>
With some tweaks:
* There's a leftover pod2man in the spec file.
* This conflicts with the virsh --tls-destination changes so don't
forget to re-merge those
* virt-host-validate patch needs this diff
diff --git a/docs/Makefile.am b/docs/Makefile.am
index e1f8f7646d..4027c2e26c 100644
--- a/docs/Makefile.am
+++ b/docs/Makefile.am
@@ -236,7 +236,7 @@ manpages_rst += \
$(NULL)
endif ! WITH_LIBVIRTD
if WITH_HOST_VALIDATE
- manpages8_rst += manpages/virt-host-validate.rst
+ manpages1_rst += manpages/virt-host-validate.rst
else ! WITH_HOST_VALIDATE
manpages_rst += manpages/virt-host-validate.rst
endif ! WITH_HOST_VALIDATE
Non-blocking stuff:
The build process spits out noise like this now, but I didn't
investigate, maybe it was there before and I missed it:
I/O error : Attempt to load network entity
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd
manpages/virkeycode-osx.html.in:2: warning: failed to load external
entity "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"
1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"
As for the format, there's some improvements and some worse things, most
are minor. The one place it's pretty ugly is virt-admin and virsh, with
the command format immediately after the command header. Old style looks
like:
quit, exit
quit this interactive terminal
Now it is:
quit, exit
quit
exit
quit this interactive terminal
For larger commands it's better, so it's mostly noticeable at the start
of the document with the short commands. Maybe drop the shell section
entirely for short style commands, or maybe there's some other option, I
didn't look into it much
The other bit is nested Example: sections with ~ underline. It puts the
Example: at the same indent as the top level command, which is ugly and
tough to read. Just grep the rst for '~~~~' and see how it manifests in
the output manpage. I think those few sections can be replaced by
boldified text with *Example:* and it looks better, at least with the
man page, but I didn't review the HTML.
- Cole