Re: developer.gnome.org and meson

[Nirbheek Chauhan <nirbheek chauhan gmail com>]

On Fri, Aug 11, 2017 at 4:10 PM, Stefan Sauer <ensonic hora-obscura de> wrote:
> On 08/09/2017 10:11 PM, Nirbheek Chauhan wrote:
> > Somewhat relatedly, the only reason why it takes so long to build docs
> > is because we haven't been improving gtk-doc. There is little
> > technical reason why building our documentation has to be *so* slow.
> > For instance, there's Hotdoc which as a proof-of-concept does the same
> > work, but much faster. So perhaps our time is better spent figuring
> > out why gtk-doc eats CPU (single-threaded!) and fixing that.
> It is not a secret why gtk-doc is slow. It is slow because libxslt and
> the xsl-stylesheets are slow. In particular libxslt is single threaded.

Thanks for the clarification, Stefan :)

> In the gtk-doc-1.26 I just release, everything was ported to python.

Yes, I was following the port to Python. It was great! Another step
towards getting rid of Perl from our toolchain. I have a vested
interest in this because it makes bootstrapping builds on, for
example, Windows much easier.

> Next step is to remove file generating code from the xslt pipeline. Then
> we can replace xslt by e.g. a markdown toolchain. I appreciate what was
> done in hotdoc, but I'd like to provide a step by step migration path
> for existing modules. I never understood why what has been done could
> not have been made inside gtk-doc as well.
> I appreciate anyone helping (like jussi helping a lot with porting from
> perl to python).

I completely agree, my mention of Hotdoc wasn't an endorsement of it,
but rather to say that there is room for improvement in the time it
takes to build our docs. A gradual migration to a markdown-based
toolchain would do wonders. Do you have any bugs about the work that's
needed so people can dive in if they can?

Cheers,
Nirbheek