Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1752852AbcKSRPu (ORCPT ); Sat, 19 Nov 2016 12:15:50 -0500 Received: from ms.lwn.net ([45.79.88.28]:46362 "EHLO ms.lwn.net" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752234AbcKSRPr (ORCPT ); Sat, 19 Nov 2016 12:15:47 -0500 Date: Sat, 19 Nov 2016 10:15:43 -0700 From: Jonathan Corbet To: Linus Torvalds Cc: Arnd Bergmann , ksummit-discuss@lists.linuxfoundation.org, "open list:DOCUMENTATION" , Linux Kernel Mailing List , Linux Media Mailing List Subject: Re: [Ksummit-discuss] Including images on Sphinx documents Message-ID: <20161119101543.12b89563@lwn.net> In-Reply-To: References: <20161107075524.49d83697@vento.lan> <11020459.EheIgy38UF@wuerfel> <20161116182633.74559ffd@vento.lan> <2923918.nyphv1Ma7d@wuerfel> Organization: LWN.net X-Mailer: Claws Mail 3.14.0 (GTK+ 2.24.31; x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2085 Lines: 42 On Thu, 17 Nov 2016 08:02:50 -0800 Linus Torvalds wrote: > We have makefiles, but more importantly, few enough people actually > *generate* the documentation, that I think if it's an option to just > fix sphinx, we should do that instead. If it means that you have to > have some development version of sphinx, so be it. Most people read > the documentation either directly in the unprocessed text-files > ("source code") or on the web (by searching for pre-formatted docs) > that I really don't think we need to worry too much about the > toolchain. > > But what we *should* worry about is having the kernel source tree > contain source. I would be happy to take a shot at fixing sphinx; we clearly need to engage more with sphinx upstream in general. But I guess I still haven't figured out what "fixing sphinx" means in this case. I don't know what the ultimate source of these images is (Mauro, perhaps you could shed some light there?). Perhaps its SVG for some of the diagrams, but for the raster images, probably not; it's probably some weird-ass diagram-editor format. We could put those in the tree, but they are likely to be harder to convert to a useful format and will raise all of the same obnoxious binary patch issues. Rather than beating our heads against the wall trying to convert between various image formats, maybe we need to take a step back. We're trying to build better documentation, and there is certainly a place for diagrams and such in that documentation. Johannes was asking about it for the 802.11 docs, and I know Paul has run into these issues with the RCU docs as well. Might there be a tool or an extension out there that would allow us to express these diagrams in a text-friendly, editable form? With some effort, I bet we could get rid of a number of the images, and perhaps end up with something that makes sense when read in the .rst source files as an extra benefit. But I'm not convinced that we can, say, sensibly express the differences between different video interlacing schemes that way. jon