Convert man pages to specialist tooling: scdoc #3591
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Pandoc do a passable job of generating man pages out of Markdown, but pandoc itself is a horrible build dependency for the mundane task of generating man pages. We've avoided this build dependency by shipping rendered man-pages in our source releases. That was not such a big deal in the autotools ecosystem where source releases are *built*, but that's really an oxymoron. We want to move to a model where our source releases are really nothing more than what git-archive outputs, and something that anybody can verify anywhere at all. To preserve man page availability, switch over to a tool that we can trivially add as a hard build requirement. scdoc is a trivially buildable piece of < 1000 lines of C code and depends on nothing that rpm doesn't otherwise depend. Being a specialized tool for man pages, I think it also does a better job at it than pandoc. Should make CI faster too because there are fewer dependencies to install. This is quite a chainsaw change, the main purpose is just to make our man pages buildable with scdoc. Making it pretty and unifying all the wildly different styles is a job for another day. Fixes: rpm-software-management#3563
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Note that after this change, the files are of course no longer Markdown, but I left renaming to proper extension to another patch to keep this somehow reviewable. |
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Interestingly built pandoc doesn't have many dependencies at all, it's just the build-requirements that kill. The size-difference is quite remarkable though:
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Pandoc do a passable job of generating man pages out of Markdown, but pandoc itself is a horrible build dependency for the mundane task of generating man pages. We've avoided this build dependency by shipping rendered man-pages in our source releases. That was not such a big deal in the autotools ecosystem where source releases are built, but that's really an oxymoron. We want to move to a model where our source releases are really nothing more than what git-archive outputs, and something that anybody can verify anywhere at all.
To preserve man page availability, switch over to a tool that we can trivially add as a hard build requirement. scdoc is a trivially buildable piece of < 1000 lines of C code and depends on nothing that rpm doesn't otherwise depend. Being a specialized tool for man pages, I think it also does a better job at it than pandoc. Should make CI faster too because there are fewer dependencies to install.
This is quite a chainsaw change, the main purpose is just to make our man pages buildable with scdoc. Making it pretty and unifying all the wildly different styles is a job for another day.
Fixes: #3563