linux-kernel - Re: V4L docs and docbook

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Message-ID: <1455783420.10645.21.camel@winder.org.uk>
Date:	Thu, 18 Feb 2016 08:17:00 +0000
From:	Russel Winder <russel@...der.org.uk>
To:	Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab@...radead.org>,
	Jonathan Corbet <corbet@....net>
Cc:	linux-media@...r.kernel.org, LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	linux-doc@...r.kernel.org, Daniel Vetter <daniel.vetter@...ll.ch>,
	Jani Nikula <jani.nikula@...el.com>,
	Keith Packard <keithp@...thp.com>,
	Graham Whaley <graham.whaley@...ux.intel.com>
Subject: Re: V4L docs and docbook

On Wed, 2016-02-17 at 21:51 -0200, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:
> […]
> 
> We have 2 types of documentation for the Kernel part of the
> subsystem,
> Both using DocBook:
> - The uAPI documentation:
> 	https://linuxtv.org/downloads/v4l-dvb-apis
> - The kAPI documentation:
> 	https://linuxtv.org/downloads/v4l-dvb-internals/device-drivers/
> mediadev.html
[…]

I may not be introducing new data here but…

Whilst ReStructuredText and Markdown are fairly popular text markup
languages, they are not related to the DocBook/XML toolchain.

Many people, especially authors of books etc. are not really willing to
write in DocBook/XML even though it is the re-purposable representation
of choice for most of the major publishers. This led to ASCIIDoc.

ASCIIDoc is a plain text markup language in the same way
ReStructuredText and Markdown are, but it's intention was always to be
a lightweight front end to DocBook/XML so as to allow authors to write
in a nice markup language but work with the DocBook/XML toolchain.

ASCIIDoc has gained quite a strong following. So much so that it now
has a life of its own separate from the DocBook/XML tool chain. There
is ASCIIDoctor which generates PDF, HTML,… from the source without
using DocBook/XML, yet the source can quite happily go through a
DocBook/XML toolchain as well.

Many of the open source projects I am involved with are now using
ASCIIDoctor as the documentation form. This has increased the number of
non-main-contributor contributions via pull requests. It is so much
easier to work with ASCIIDoc(tor) source than DocBook/XML source. 

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@...ga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@...der.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

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