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Date:   Fri, 27 Mar 2020 10:35:00 -0700
From:   Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>
To:     Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
Cc:     Jani Nikula <jani.nikula@linux.intel.com>,
        peter@bikeshed.quignogs.org.uk, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
        Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>,
        "Rafael J. Wysocki" <rafael@kernel.org>, linux-doc@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH v3 0/1] Compactly make code examples into literal blocks
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On Fri, Mar 27, 2020 at 11:11:06AM -0600, Jonathan Corbet wrote:
> On Fri, 27 Mar 2020 09:50:22 -0700
> Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org> wrote:
> 
> > Let me just check I understand Jani's proposal here.  You want to change
> > 
> > * Return: Number of pages, or negative errno on failure
> > 
> > to
> > 
> > * Return
> > * ~~~~~~
> > * Number of pages, or negative errno on failure
> > 
> > If so, I oppose such an increase in verbosity and I think most others
> > would too.  If not, please let me know what you're actually proposing ;-)
> 
> I told you there would be resistance :)

Happy to help out!

> I think a reasonable case can be made for using the same documentation
> format throughout our docs, rather than inventing something special for
> kerneldoc comments.  So I personally don't think the above is terrible,
> but as I already noted, I anticipate resistance.
> 
> An alternative would be to make a little sphinx extension; then it would
> read more like:
> 
> 	.. returns:: Number of pages, except when the moon is full
> 
> ...which would still probably not be entirely popular.

I certainly see the value in consistency throughout our documentation.
But I don't think it's a given that the documentation of the return
value is necessarily its own section.  I see kernel-doc as being more
about semantic markup and the rst files as being a presentation markup.

So I'm fine with Return:: introducing a list or Example:: introducing
a code section; these are special purpose keywords.  I'm not a fan of
using raw rst in kernel-doc.  Of course if we can make the kernel-doc
and rst languages the same for the same concepts, that's great.