Re: Porting the Docs to Sphinx - project status

[Matthias Klose <doko@ubuntu.com>]

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 ...

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.  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.

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.

Matthias