[Nix-dev] Fwd: Wiki is dead

[Eelco Dolstra]

Hi,

On 22/02/16 00:58, Thomas Hunger wrote:

> I've given this a try [1] for the zero-build-failures entry and my experience so
> far was:
> 
> 1/ How do I actually build docbook?
>   => copy doc/default.nix and adjust
> 2/ nix-build is rebuilding GHC 7.8 and 7.10 (for pandoc I think).
>   => Wait 2h.
> 3/ GHC build fails [2]
> 4/ We're not using standard docbook but preprocess with XSLT so references on
> the internet don't actually work.

This speaks in favor of keeping *all* docs in Docbook format so we don't need
conversion tools like Pandoc. Then the manual generation only depends on
xsltproc  and docbook-xsl. This is pretty much a hard requirement for the NixOS
manual because I don't think it's a good idea for the core system to pull in Pandoc.

In fact, I think having multiple formats is not a good idea in general, because
it makes it hard to restructure the manual (e.g., you can't just move a manual
fragment between different sections if they're written in different formats).
And it requires contributors to learn the idiosyncrasies of multiple formats.

-- 
Eelco Dolstra | LogicBlox, Inc. | http://nixos.org/~eelco/