[DRE-maint] Bug#796497: ruby-ronn: depends on obsolete ruby-hpricot

[Axel Beckert]

Hi,

Antonio Terceiro wrote:
> > While ronn is a useful tool, asciidoc and asciidoctor are viable
> > alternatives and are actively maintained as well as available in
> > stretch and jessie.

Since when do asciidoc and asciidoctor support Markdown?

> I had a quick look at ronn and it looks like a lost case. it seems to convert
> the markdown input to HTML first, and only then from HTML to roff, and the
> dependency on hpricot seems very entrenched.
> 
> We currently have 24 packages build-depending on ruby-ronn:
>
> $ grep-dctrl -F Build-Depends -n -s Package ruby-ronn Sources | sort -u

Instead of decreasing, this even grew over time: This command now
finds 32 packages in Sid main only (haven't checked experimental nor
contrib or non-free):

codequery
coquelicot
ctop
cura-engine
dbab
elektra
foodcritic
foremancli
gazebo
git-extras
haproxyctl
i3blocks
ignition-math2
ignition-transport
jq
maim
npm
pacapt
pgloader
python-lua
qiime
r10k
ruby-coveralls
ruby-ghi
sen
seqprep
shapelib
slt
unburden-home-dir
vcsh
voltron
zeal

And yes, I'm at least guilty for unburden-home-dir as I added
generating the man page with ronn in the past year without being aware
of the deprecation of one of its dependencies. For me, it still seems
the best Markdown to Man Page converter despite its internal ugliness
explained above.

I still fail to see how asciidoc and asciidoctor can be seen as
alternatives. The only potential alternatives I'm aware of are
go-md2man and pandoc.

But go-md2man and especially pandoc seem far more heavy-weight
build-dependencies than ronn, at least if Ruby is already installed on
the system…

Since unburden-home-dir is a perl-based project, I'd prefer a
perl-written Markdown to Man Page converter anyways, but I so far
failed to find one.

		Regards, Axel
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