Re: [PATCH 0/2] docs: Programmatically render MAINTAINERS into ReST

[Jonathan Corbet]

On Tue, 24 Sep 2019 16:02:06 -0700
Kees Cook <keescook@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Commit log from Patch 2 repeated here for cover letter:
> 
> In order to have the MAINTAINERS file visible in the rendered ReST
> output, this makes some small changes to the existing MAINTAINERS file
> to allow for better machine processing, and adds a new Sphinx directive
> "maintainers-include" to perform the rendering.

I finally got around to trying this out.  After the usual warnings, the
build comes to a screeching halt with this:

  Sphinx parallel build error:
  UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 8: ordinal not in range(128)

For extra fun, the build process simply hangs, requiring a ^C to blow it
away.  You've managed to get new behavior out of Sphinx that I've not seen
before, congratulations :)

This almost certainly has to do with the fact that I'm (intentionally)
running the Python2 Sphinx build here.  Something's not doing unicode that
should be.

I would suggest that we might just want to repair this before merging this
feature.  Either that, or we bite the bullet and deprecate the use of
Python 2 entirely - something that's probably not too far into our future
regardless.  Anybody have thoughts on that matter?

On a separate note...it occurred to me, rather belatedly as usual, that
last time we discussed doing this that there was some opposition to adding
a second MAINTAINERS parser to the kernel; future changes to the format of
that file may force both to be adjusted, and somebody will invariably
forget one.  Addressing that, if we feel a need to do so, probably requires
tweaking get_maintainer.pl to output the information in a useful format.

Thanks,

jon