Re: [PULL] Docs for 4.13

[Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>]

On Mon, 3 Jul 2017 21:32:33 -0700
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:

> Eg things like
> 
>   Error: Cannot open file ./kernel/rcu/srcu.c
>   Error: Cannot open file ./kernel/rcu/srcu.c
> 
> happen simply because that file no longer exists, and the docs never
> got updated.
> 
> So my merge didn't even try to fix those kinds of things at all.  I
> literally just looked at the conflicts and moved those over to the rst
> files, and that was it. There's a lot of other changes that never
> cause conflicts for the simple reason that those changes never caused
> documentation changes to begin with.
> 
> Now, this is obviously not new, but it does strike me that if checking
> for these kinds of things was easier and part of "make allmodconfig",
> then we might have less of it happen.

I see Markus already tossed out a patch using the sphinx "dummy mode".
It might be possible to create a dead-simple linter for this kind of
thing that would be quite a bit faster, but I wonder how much we really
need it.  Problems like this pop up with great regularity, but they
tend to be caught and fixed fairly quickly.  Meanwhile, the world
stubbornly refuses to end if the docs build tosses out a few (more)
errors for a few days. I don't think we have to slow down everybody's
build for this.

(Getting something into the build-and-boot testers might not be a bad
idea, though).

I've committed a patch to fix this particular problem, will send it
youward in a few days.

jon