Anybody still using the chm docs

[Martin Nowak]

On 02/18/2018 02:05 AM, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 2/17/2018 7:04 AM, Martin Nowak wrote:
>> Let's pull the plug, I think everybody agrees that we have more
>> important issues than maintaining d.chm and dman (which hasn't been
>> shipped since 2.076 anyhow).
>> Consider both tools as offered for adoption (as an external service or
>> download).
>>
>> https://github.com/dlang/installer/pull/298
>>
> 
> I find dman very useful, as I'm a command line sorta guy. In fact, I
> wrote it because it's a major convenience for me.

I know, but I think you are one of the very users though.

On my shell it's simple to add an alias that would invoke
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=popFrontN+site%3Adlang.org%2Flibrary.
Personally I do have a browser shortcut 'd' for my Brower's omnibox, so
I can just type 'd popFrontN' in FireFox to find docs.

The essence here is that while dman might be useful, it's foundation is
very complex and fragile, using ddoc JSON macros :o
(https://github.com/dlang/dlang.org/blob/cb44110267d0b5d2e139909c47fa00924ac1cb24/chm-nav.dd)
and a self-written html/link processor to gather tags.
Sure Vladimir is great at maintaining tools and very responsive, but
still any issue with this tool blocks our releases and wastes my time.

Same as for d.chm, I'd favor if that tool would be build and distributed
separately from our dmd releases, and if the actual users would maintain
it. This could be setup on Travis-CI using ldc to cross-compile for all
target platforms or so.

-Martin