RFC: Source-markup language for GHC User's Guide

[Edward Z. Yang]

I personally don't have a problem writing Docbook, and one problem
with moving to lightweight markup is it becomes a bit harder to
keep your markup semantic.

Edward

Excerpts from Herbert Valerio Riedel's message of 2014-10-07 09:20:43 -0600:
> Hello GHC Developers & GHC User's Guide writers,
> 
> I assume it is common knowledge to everyone here, that the GHC User's
> Guide is written in Docbook XML markup.
> 
> However, it's a bit tedious to write Docbook-XML by hand, and the XML
> markup is not as lightweight as modern state-of-the-art markup languages
> designed for being edited in a simple text-editor are.
> 
> Therefore I'd like to hear your opinion on migrating away from the
> current Docbook XML markup to some other similarly expressive but yet
> more lightweight markup documentation system such as Asciidoc[1] or
> ReST/Sphinx[2].
> 
> There's obviously some cost involved upfront for a (semi-automatic)
> conversion[3].  So one important question is obviously whether the
> long-term benefits outweight the cost/investment that we'd incur for the
> initial conversion.
> 
> All suggestions/comments/worries welcome; please commence brainstorming :)
> 
> 
> 
>  [1]: http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/
> 
>  [2]: http://sphinx-doc.org/
> 
>  [3]: There's automatic conversion tools to aid (though manual cleanup
>       is still needed) the initial conversion, such as
> 
>          https://github.com/oreillymedia/docbook2asciidoc
> 
>       As an example, here's the conversion of
> 
>          http://git.haskell.org/ghc.git/blob/HEAD:/docs/users_guide/extending_ghc.xml
>       
>       to Asciidoc:
>       
>          https://phabricator.haskell.org/P24
> 
>       to give an idea how XML compares to Asciidoc