Re: Bug#796497: reconsidering the removal of ruby-hpricot

[Axel Beckert]

Hi Michael,

Michael Crusoe wrote:
> > > On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 06:26:06PM +0200, Christian Hofstaedtler wrote:
> > > - something else can replace ruby-ronn and we manage to make reverse
> > >   (build) dependencies switch to it.
> >
> > Before starting to use ronn in an official release of
> > unburden-home-dir, I tried different tools and was very unsatisfied:
> >
> > * go-md2man
> > * pandoc
> >
> > There is also https://github.com/sunaku/md2man which is not yet
> > packaged. Haven't tried that one yet since it requires a newer version
> > of rubygems (2.5.2) than in Debian Unstable (2.5.1):
> > https://github.com/sunaku/binman/issues/4
> 
> For the jaligner package we had a good experience with asciidoctor program
> 
> http://sources.debian.net/src/jaligner/1.0%2Bdfsg-4/debian/jaligner.adoc/

Thanks for that hint.

That would though mean to switch the man page source format from the
Markdown format to the AsciiDoc format, which might have other
impacts, like e.g. publishing on ReadTheDocs, GitBooks (supports
AsciiDoc only as 2nd class citizen and no adoc/md mixed contents), or
GitHub Pages with Jekyll (does not work for me currently anyway, but
still), etc.:

http://unburden-home-dir.readthedocs.io/en/latest/unburden-home-dir.1/index.html
https://xtaran.gitbooks.io/unburden-home-dir/content/docs/unburden-home-dir.1.html

But if switching the format would be an option, I'd switch to Perl's
POD as that converts very well and out-of-the-box to man pages.

Regards, Axel
-- 
 ,''`.  |  Axel Beckert , http://people.debian.org/~abe/
: :' :  |  Debian Developer, ftp.ch.debian.org Admin
`. `'   |  4096R: 2517 B724 C5F6 CA99 5329  6E61 2FF9 CD59 6126 16B5
  `-|  1024D: F067 EA27 26B9 C3FC 1486  202E C09E 1D89 9593 0EDE

Re: Bug#796497: reconsidering the removal of ruby-hpricot

[Axel Beckert]

Hi Antonio,

Antonio Terceiro wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 06:26:06PM +0200, Christian Hofstaedtler wrote:
> > We're not going to have ruby-hpricot in stretch.
> 
> ruby-hpricot has now only 2 reverse dependencies: ruby-ronn and
> ruby-fast-fs. However, the number of packages build-depending on
> ruby-ronn only grows, and is currently at 54¹

Noticed that, too, mostly because I'm partially guilty for that,
because I use ronn to generate unburden-home-dir's man page from
Markdown since 0.4, to be able to also provide the man page in the
online documentation as HTML.

> ruby-hpricot is indeed dead upstream, but so is a lot of software in
> Debian. Also, being dead upstream does not mean not being useful, or
> necessarily being broken.

Fully agree. Especially ronn does a real good job.

> So I think we should give up on removing ruby-hpricot until at least one
> of the following happen:
> 
> - ruby-ronn gets rewritten to not use ruby-hpricot (unlikely since ronn
>   is dead upstream itself)

Indeed:

* Last release June 2010: https://github.com/rtomayko/ronn/releases
* Last commit in August 2013: https://github.com/rtomayko/ronn/commits/master
* Last comment by author on issues or pull requests in August 2013:
  https://github.com/rtomayko/ronn/pull/77#issuecomment-22620549

> - something else can replace ruby-ronn and we manage to make reverse
>   (build) dependencies switch to it.

Before starting to use ronn in an official release of
unburden-home-dir, I tried different tools and was very unsatisfied:

* go-md2man
* pandoc

There is also https://github.com/sunaku/md2man which is not yet
packaged. Haven't tried that one yet since it requires a newer version
of rubygems (2.5.2) than in Debian Unstable (2.5.1):
https://github.com/sunaku/binman/issues/4

Regards, Axel
-- 
 ,''`.  |  Axel Beckert , http://people.debian.org/~abe/
: :' :  |  Debian Developer, ftp.ch.debian.org Admin
`. `'   |  4096R: 2517 B724 C5F6 CA99 5329  6E61 2FF9 CD59 6126 16B5
  `-|  1024D: F067 EA27 26B9 C3FC 1486  202E C09E 1D89 9593 0EDE