Re: Kernel docs: muddying the waters a bit

[Mauro Carvalho Chehab]

Em Tue, 08 Mar 2016 05:09:40 -0700
Dan Allen <dan@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> escreveu:

> Jani wrote:
> 
> > there was no support for chunked, or split
> > to chapters, HTML, and the single page result was simply way too big.
> >  
> 
> That's not entirely true. First, you can pre-split at the source level
> using includes and generate output for each of the masters. That's what I
> tend to do and it works really well since these are logical split points.

The problem on pre-splitting the documents and process them in separate
is that this will break cross-references. At the media uAPI Docbook,
we use a lot of cross references.

Btw, we use a lot of includes. Currently, it has 187 separate files.

We even parse the header files looking for typedefs, structs, enums,
#defines and functions, in order to produce a document that will
cross-reference the documentation.

> Second, there is a custom converter in the works to split post-generate
> (which is really what we're talking about when we compare it to the DocBook
> toolchain).
> 
> https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor-extensions-lab/blob/master/lib/multipage-html5-converter.rb
> 
> It's just a prototype, but proves it is possible by design.

I didn't test it, but I saw some comments at the web that the part
that would handle cross-references between files is not ready.

> Personally, I don't like most chunked HTML approaches because they split
> arbitrarily. We are trying to find the right balance so that the output is
> actually sensible. There's still work to do, but there are options in the
> meantime.

Well, if it is capable of creating one chunk per include file, and do
cross-references between chunks, this would work for media UAPI book.

Yet, it would be good to have the multi-chunk extension packaged
on major distros, as I don't like the idea of installing it without
using my distro's package manager.

-- 
Thanks,
Mauro