This series introduces the use of Sphinx for building man pages. There are a
couple of reasons for doing this:

- roff is ruff to write

  Sorry. roff is an old markup format that's mostly used for man pages today.
  While certainly not impossible to parse, it isn't very pleasant to either
  read or write (as evidenced by the XML-roff toolchain used for the OVN
  sources). Sphinx/rST isn't perfect but it's certainly easier on the eyes.

- Sphinx/rST über alles

  We already use Sphinx for every other bit of documentation in the toolchain.
  Why force people to learn a second syntax for man pages?

- Integration with other documentation

  By building with Sphinx, we can do basic things like output the man pages as
  part of the documentation along with more advanced things like
  cross-referencing applications from elesewhere in the docs.

This series begins work on converting the docs, starting with two small
utilities: ovs-test and ovs-vlan-test. We can use these to tease out any issues
we might have with the idea before expanding this to more complex man pages
(ovs-vsctl, I'm looking at you). The eventual goal would be to move all man
pages to rST/Sphinx.
---
I meant to send this months ago, but I completely forgot about it. It's
unfinished, as evidenced by the commit footers. However, I think with a little
help from the maintainers of the packaging in OVS, it will be easy push this
over the line and move onto the bigger, more important man pages.

Stephen Finucane (4):
  doc: Add man page section to documentation guide
  doc: Convert ovs-vlan-test to rST
  doc: Convert ovs-test to rST
  doc: Remove latex output configuration

 Documentation/automake.mk                          |  23 +--
 Documentation/conf.py                              |   6 +-
 .../internals/contributing/documentation-style.rst |  85 ++++++++++-
 Documentation/intro/install/documentation.rst      |   4 +-
 Documentation/ref/index.rst                        |  17 ++-
 Documentation/ref/ovs-test.rst                     | 165 +++++++++++++++++++++
 Documentation/ref/ovs-vlan-test.rst                | 114 ++++++++++++++
 debian/openvswitch-switch.manpages                 |   1 -
 debian/openvswitch-test.manpages                   |   1 -
 manpages.mk                                        |  20 ---
 utilities/automake.mk                              |   6 -
 11 files changed, 389 insertions(+), 53 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 Documentation/ref/ovs-test.rst
 create mode 100644 Documentation/ref/ovs-vlan-test.rst

-- 
2.9.3

_______________________________________________
dev mailing list
[email protected]
https://mail.openvswitch.org/mailman/listinfo/ovs-dev

Reply via email to