kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Brian Sidebotham <brian.sidebotham@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 4 February 2015 at 00:14, Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> We need to make a decision soon if we want to get the documentation
> conversion completed in time for the next stable release.  I'm still not
> sure we can build on Windows.  Neither the MSYS2 asciidoc or sphinx
> implementations worked correctly the last time I tried them and I have
> no way to test any of this on OSX.  Cygwin may work but the last time I
> tried to build kicad on cygwin, it was more trouble than it was worth.
> This would limit us to building the documentation only on linux which
> I'm not terribly thrilled about.  This means if you wanted to build a
> windows installer you would have to run linux in a VM to build the
> documentation.  That would be painful for our auto builders folks.  If
> we get much further along, we may just have to live with the
> documentation we have now and convert to a plain text format for the
> next release.

I think we're pretty much decided already on asciidoc - it just takes
someone to say so. I've included Marco on this email so perhaps he
could give us his up-to-date conclusion and we can make the decision
now.

As for being able to build, well, we need to decide on an output
format. I think we've previously been hinting at html rather than PDF.
We don't need to support a million output formats. PDF is much harder
to support compared to HTML for example.

However, nothing requires a POSIX shell, so we definitely don't need
to add-in cygwin, MSYS2 or anything else as a dependency for building
docs.

asciidoc works okay for me under windows, but a2x for PDF conversion
doesn't work. However, projects like asciidoctor-fopub and
asciidoctor-pdf are well underway to sort that problem out.

I'll put a CMake build system in place on the documentation and make
sure it works on Windows + Linux. OSX guys will have to help me in
making sure it works there. It shouldn't be a problem though.

So decide input and output formats and we can start implementing the
CMake build system on the Github repo.

Best Regards,

Brian.