asciidoc is my favorite document markup language. I'm writing a book in it now: "The Programmer's Way: a guide to right mindset". I also rely on it as the leade of the NTPsec project; our documentation and our website is all built in asciidoc.
Because I need this tool to work and to keep working, I've become concerned by what appears to be drift and fragmentation in the community around it. Rather than just complain, I'm willing to pitch in and help. I can offer strong skills in Python and in writing or editing documentation. One area of concern I have is that asciidoc.org looks stale. I have 8.6.10 installed, but the main asciidoc.org page is still written as though 8.6.9 is the latest release. Who controls asciidoc.org? Is it updated from a public repository? Can I get write access or make MRs to do updates on it? If I could get those permissions I would write the release update myself. I have also recently learned that asciidoc is missing some book example files, which I now actually have. I would be willing to take responsibility for making sure those go up on the site and clearing the rights with Stuart Rackham, but I'd need write access to do that. There are now four competing implementations of asciidoc. I do not view this as a bad thing, but I do think it is a problem that there is no one place where users can go to learn how they differ functionally from each other. I'd be willing to work on fixing this. Again, I would need write access to asciidoc.org; I would also need a little cooperation from the implementation maintainers - basically, stable pointers to their own difference lists. Given that Stuart Rackham has retired from development, I'm gathering that base Python asciidoc should be considered end-of-lifed and there will be no more releases. Does the official Python 3 port now test as equivalent to it? I'm concerned about this because Python 2 is going to EOL in 2020 and I need to plan on a longer timescale than that, especially with respect to NTPsec. It seems to me that right about now we ought to be declaring the Python 3 port release 9.0.0 and telling the distros to replace the Python 2 port. Is anyone in charge of this kind of decision? Are all the maintainers for the variants on this list? If there's some technical reason the Python 3 port is not ready for prime time I am willing to pitch in and code. There are also some language issues that concern me. NTPsec is using base asciidoc because asciidoctor tossed out a particular configuration-file feature that we needed. On the other hand, base asciidoc's config-file interpretation rules can best be described as a horrible mess that clearly grew by accretion rather than design. There is clearly cleanup work to be done in this area, but I'm concerned that attempting it will increase user pain unless the three live variants dob some coordination so that the cleaned-up behavior is reasonably stable across implementations. Again, I'm not just here to bitch. This tool is important to me and I'm willing to put in work to fix these problems. What else can I do to help? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "asciidoc" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/asciidoc. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
