[darcs-users] Darcs Manual (was: Re: darcs patch: Remove autoconf...)

[Trent W. Buck]

On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 07:31:54PM -0400, Max Battcher wrote:
> Eric Kow wrote:
> >On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 19:37:52 +1000, Trent W. Buck wrote:
> >>On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 07:05:17AM +0200, Petr Rockai wrote:
> >>>>latex2html is not DFSG-compliant.  But everyone seems to use it
> >>>>anyway... :-(
> >>>Yes: I just saw that latex2html is hardcoded elsewhere in the GNUmakefile
> >>My apologies, Eric and I have probably already had this discussion.
> >
> >I'm prepared to try anything else that would do the same job of giving
> >us a usable bigpage (and little sections) manual on the website.
> 
> Speaking of which what is the status on the reST conversion, Trent?

Work is still happening to infrastructure (getting manpage and manual
generation into the Darcs program to appease cabal, adopting pandoc)
and migrating content from TeX into the Haskell source, so it
accessible interactively as well as from an offline manual.

I'm confident that we'll eventually transition to using reST to markup
the documentation (instead of the current mishmash of verbatim string
(in Haskell) and .tex files), but my position is still that improving
what the documentation *says* takes priority over what it looks like.

My initial efforts at simply rewriting .tex files into rest fell down
because that approach requires the WHOLE conversion be done at once,
or it breaks builds.  Now I'm intending more incremental changes, such
as changing the manpage generation code to use pandoc to take in reST
and spit out roff, rather than the current ad-hoc NIH implementation.