Should we include rst2man?

[Matt Mackall]

On Thu, 2009-09-03 at 11:33 +0200, Martin Geisler wrote:
> Hi guys,
> 
> Our new reST documentation system requires an unreleased version of
> Docutils to generate the manpages.
> 
> I have talked off-list with Mads Kiilerich about this, and he made me
> aware that it is not just a question of asking people to install
> Docutils (which is trivial, it's a pure Python package) but also a
> question of how Mercurial packages can declare their build-dependencies.
> 
> The Debian maintainer has it easy: there is already a suitable rst2man
> package in Debian. But not so for Fedora and I guess other distributions
> also lack a rst2man package.
> 
> Being unable to build a package using only other packages from the same
> distribution is a bad situation. Some users might also not be
> comfortable with installing a snapshot version of Docutils, especially
> if they already have (and use) a stable Docutils on their system.
> 
> So I suggest we make life easier for both package maintainers and users
> in general and include the rst2man tool in Mercurial itself, similarly
> to how we include byterange.py from urlgrabber.
> 
> The script is ~1100 lines and could live as /doc/rst2man. The only
> requirement for a Mercurial install will then be a "normal" Docutils
> installation.
> 
> What do you think of this idea?
> 
> We can remove the rst2man tool again when Docutils 0.6 has been released
> and packaged and when important bugs are fixed in the upstream rst2man.

Sounds good to me. In fact, I might wait quite a bit longer to take it
back out to see how upstream matures.

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