[Build-common-hackers] Documenting CDBS

Jonas Smedegaard dr at jones.dk
Fri Jan 7 13:23:19 UTC 2011


On Fri, Jan 07, 2011 at 10:52:31AM +0100, Marc Dequènes (Duck) wrote:
>Happy new year everybody :-).

Thanks - and likewise. :-)


>Quoting Felipe Sateler <fsateler at debian.org>:
>
>>Hmm, the git history of CDBS does not go far enough back in time to 
>>the fork point. By the first cdbs commit the diff is huge. I think 
>>some manual merging will be needed. I'll try to do this ASAP.
>
>The fork happened somewhere in 2006, because Peter added a revised 
>version of my initial documentation without even telling me. At this 
>time the content was made after a wiki page note, which targeted as 
>having a funny tone, in order to tell people CDBS was easy and pleasant 
>to use, and i was not willing to change this. When i talked to him, we 
>had several other disagreements on the content (for more serious issues 
>than tone), and neither of us was willing to rework everything. A few 
>years later, we agreed on making this merge, but we had no real time 
>for this.

Thanks a lot for letting us in on the history of matters.  Much 
appreciated!


>Since a few months, DH7 is killing most of our users,

Correction: Not debhelper itself, but one (arguably the main) feature 
introduced in debhelper 7: short-form dh.

What might confuse matters (statistics etc.) is packagers (like me) 
using CDBS and no new features of debhelper, and thus keeping to compat 
level 6 to ease backportability of the packaging.

CDBS should work perfectly fine with debhelper 7 (and 8) as long as 
avoiding short-form dh.


>so my will to work on CDBS has decreased a lot, but i'm still 
>maintaining the documentation from time to time, as i think it is still 
>useful.

...and that is great!



>Nevertheless, if the Team wish to maintain CDBS at least a few more 
>years, a merge would be very useful.

I have no plans to abandon CDBS.



>On the format, i agree DocBook is not easy to write, and we probably 
>don't have such a need for semantic. KiBi also told me about markdown, 
>and the result seems quite clean without much work; i think it would be 
>sufficient and faster to write (any other simple markup langage could 
>fit too, like textile, but markdown seems richer).

Actually my suggesting Markdown as source format is not for its richness 
but lazyness: I already use it extensively for my web design work. ;-)

That said, I find it on par with e.g. textile when it comes to 
popularity - as I don't want to end up maintaining it all on my own :-)

Also, I know for a fact that Markdown supports i18n as I wrote that code 
for po4a.  I noticed you maintain some translation of your docs, Marc, 
which would be great to preserve.



>For the method, i guess starting from the content of the most 
>up-to-date version, and identify the missing parts, using manual diff 
>with the other one, and with existing classes, would probably the best 
>road to follow, as the diff is now really huge.

@Felipe: Are you still interested in taking this challenge?



>I'd be happy to follow the progress on this subject. Thanks for 
>Cc-ing me about it.

You still want to be kept cc'ed, or are you subscribed to the list and 
only want cc to raise awareness on some specifics?


  - Jonas

-- 
  * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
  * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

  [x] quote me freely  [ ] ask before reusing  [ ] keep private
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