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Updating LFE Documentation

Structure

In order to support multiple format document generation as well as inclusion in a LFE static documentation site generator, the LFE docs moved from .txt files to .md files. The old .txt files are still provided in their original locations (though their formatting has changed a little), however these files are now generated from the Markdown source files in doc/src.

In addition to generating the "classic" LFE text file documentation, LFE man pages are now also generated and provided in the LFE git repo. There are also make targets for generating .pdf and .epub versions of the LFE docs, but these are not maintained in the git repo.

The layout of the LFE documentation files tracked by the LFE git repository is as follows:

  • doc/src/*.md - Canonical LFE documentation
  • doc/*.txt - Auto-generated LFE documentation in plain-text format
  • doc/man/*.[1-7] - Auto-generated LFE documentation in man-page format

Files not tracked by the repository but present after running make docs-all are as follows:

  • doc/pdf/*.pdf
  • doc/epub/*.epub

(Re)Building the Docs

There are two ways of updating the LFE documentation:

  • Native: running the make docs or make docs-all targets
  • Docker: running the make docker-docs target

Native

Building LFE documentation natively on one's system depends upon Pandoc, which in turn depends upon Haskell. Furthermore, the groff and col utilities are used to required to convert man page files to the preferred plain-text format.

On Debian-based systems, these may be installed with the following:

$ sudo apt-get install -y pandoc groff groff-base bsdmainutils

Since col will need to have a UTF-8 locate configured, we also recommend the following:

$ sudo locale-gen en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

After running the first command, if you're /etc/locale.gen file still has your preferred locale commented out, you may need to edit that file and then re-run sudo locale-gen && sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales.

At this point, you should have everything ready to generate the LFE docs from Markdown source. Regenerating the docs from the source .md files may then be performed by executing the following:

$ make docs

Docker

Since the overhead of installing the above documentation dependencies may be too much for some users, we have also provided a Dockerfile in the doc directory for building LFE docs from source without having to install Pandoc, Haskell, etc., on your own system. This does, of course, require that you have docker installed and running on your system.

You will need to use the LFE docs Dockerfile to generate an LFE Docker image for that has the latest LFE docs in it:

$ make docker-build

Then, to generate the LFE docs using the Docker image:

$ make docker-docs

This make target will generate the LFE docs inside the Docker image, but it will also mount the local/host ./doc directory, over-writing the existing doc/*.txt and doc/man/*.[1-7] files. Since these files will be regenerated as root in the Docker image, the final step in the make target is to chown these files to $USER:$USER.