[petsc-dev] Sowing: proposed change to allow single-entry lists on man pages

[Balay, Satish]

Patrick,

PR is now at: https://bitbucket.org/petsc/petsc/pull-requests/1838/fixes-for-doctext-update/diff

Satish


On Sat, 29 Jun 2019, Patrick Sanan via petsc-dev wrote:

> That's great! That'll go a long way towards making the man pages look
> neater - I'm happy to review the PR that updates the arg lists on the man
> pages - is your branch off of master (and thus can be submitted with the
> usual procedure of a pull request on bitbucket)?
> 
> Am Di., 25. Juni 2019 um 09:05 Uhr schrieb Gropp, William D <
> wgropp at illinois.edu>:
> 
> > Thanks for this suggestion.  The + and - were added to make it easier to
> > generate a nicely formatted list, though its possible to look for
> > transitions from non-list to list and back to non-list.  Think of + as
> > similar to \begin{description}\item … and - as \item … \end{description}.
> >
> > I’ve updated doctext to allow both - and a isolated . for an argument
> > description. In the process of doing this, I added checks for errors in the
> > use of the doctext formatting, and found many minor errors, as well as
> > updating the old arg lists that didn’t use the + .. - . I have a branch for
> > petsc that fixes all of those (it was the easiest way for me to be sure my
> > doctext fixes worked) that will need to be merged.  Let me know how you’d
> > like me to submit that. There are also many malformed entries where there
> > is no description.  I’ve turned those warnings off by default, but
> > -Wargdesc will warn for each argument that is missing a description; some
> > of these should use different formatting instead of the argument lists.
> >
> > The new version, in sowing-1.1.26, also has updates to bfort (which
> > requires the patch that I sent earlier to bin/maint/generatefortranstubs.py
> > ) and other miscellaneous fixes.  I’ve uploaded this version to my web page
> > and it is the default when you download sowing.tar.gz .  I am unable to
> > update the confdb macros to fix errors in them - the permissions have
> > changed on the repository (for my own files!).  Because of that and other
> > problems, I plan to move sowing to a git repository that I fully control
> > soon; this weekend if I can.
> >
> > Let me know if you have any problems.
> >
> > Bill
> >
> > William Gropp
> > Director and Chief Scientist, NCSA
> > Thomas M. Siebel Chair in Computer Science
> > University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On Jun 15, 2019, at 12:06 PM, Smith, Barry F. <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > On Jun 15, 2019, at 11:57 AM, Patrick Sanan <patrick.sanan at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > Great! I'll leave that commit there for reference, but as you say it would
> > be even nicer (but more coding) to avoid needing to explicitly mark the
> > starts and ends of lists.
> >
> >
> >   Yeah, I only remember vaguely that initially we didn't use the + and -
> > on the lists and there was some issue so they were introduced.
> >
> >  Barry
> >
> >
> > Am Sa., 15. Juni 2019 um 17:54 Uhr schrieb Smith, Barry F. <
> > bsmith at mcs.anl.gov>:
> >
> >  Patrick (and Bill)
> >
> >     Good timing. Bill is actually updating Sowing now and could perhaps
> > fix this glitch. Currently we use a . for a single entry in the list and
> > I'd hate to have to change them all the -. Likely it is possible to fix the
> > formatting for the . case to have the same indent as the + . - cases.
> >
> >   Barry
> >
> > On Jun 15, 2019, at 10:15 AM, Patrick Sanan via petsc-dev <
> > petsc-dev at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
> >
> > Lists on the man pages don't seem to be able to have a single entry,
> > because sowing requires you to start lists with "+" and end them with "-",
> > requiring at least two entries.
> >
> > This leads to ugly-looking indentation for man pages for functions with a
> > single input or output parameter, e.g.
> > https://www.mcs.anl.gov/petsc/petsc-dev/docs/manualpages/DMSTAG/DMStagVecGetArrayDOF.html
> >
> > I think that this can be remedied with a small change to sowing (doctext),
> > to interpret a lone '-' as opening a list (and then closing it after one
> > entry):
> > https://bitbucket.org/psanan/sowing/commits/780ea53824388e8c6089ae2d6210332c63935edb
> >
> > (Posting this here since I'm not sure how closely the
> > bitbucket.org/petsc/pkg-sowing repository is monitored)
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
>