On Thu, Aug 11, 2016 at 7:04 PM, Brian Exelbierd <bex@pobox.com> wrote:

This email is to drive some discussion around $subject.  It follows from
a blog soon to be posted on the Fedora Community blog
(https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org).  The text below is copied
from that blog:

Tooling, Tooling, Tooling

There was strong consensus around changing to new tools and markups. In
fact, most of the tooling conversations were held in small groups near
the end of the meeting. There was a desire to continue to see a drive to
simpler contribution and publication.


I also agree with changing to newer tools which makes writing the docs
a lot simplier.



The only significant question was around the community, upstream
adoption and contributor base for pintail which is the central tool in
the new processing flow. People were very concerned that there wasn't
evidence of enough adoption and contribution to prevent the project from
being at risk of going either unmaintained or slowly maintained.



First let me briefly explain how the new process works.

* Docs are written in AsciiDoc (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AsciiDoc)
* Converted to Mallard (http://projectmallard.org/)
* Publish them using pintail (https://github.com/projectmallard/pintail)

Docs team had came to this conclusion after considering various
alternatives (https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/event-report-fedora-docs-fad/,
https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/event-report-fedora-docs-fad/)

AsciiDoc is widely used various projects (http://asciidoc.org/#X6)

Gnome is using Mallard for writing docs
(https://wiki.gnome.org/DocumentationProject/Contributing#Write_in_Mallard)

I agree to some extent that there is no enough evidence of adoption
and contribution (Shaun has written 99% of the tools!), but since
Gnome is adopting Mallard we should feel confident to some extent.

If by chance the Mallard goes unmaintained we could also switch to
other tools (like Asciidoctor http://asciidoctor.org/) for publishing
as we write the docs in Asciidoc format. But this method reduces the
features that we wanted to use.


PS:  Brian congrats for becoming Fedora's Community Co-ordinator.