[Python-modules-team] Bug#473585: Bug #473585: python-docutils: Handle CSS for rst2html as configuration file

[Simon McVittie]

(I'm going through all the docutils bug reports in Debian; sorry to be
resurrecting this after so long...)

I'm really not convinced that having rst2html get its CSS file from /etc
is a reasonable enhancement; you're essentially proposing that docutils'
output become dependent on the (configuration of the) machine it's run on.

This seems inappropriate for what's basically a (specialized) compiler (it's 
used in the build process of several Debian packages, for instance, including
at least one of mine). The docutils rst2html command seems to me as
though it ought to take input (options and source) and produce output,
with the output being generated deterministically from the input (rather
than from the input plus some details of the environment in which it's run).

If you have project-specific options that you always want to pass to the
rst2* tools, putting options in a config file and using --config=something.cfg
seems a better solution - at least you only need one command-line option that
way. I tend to write a Makefile whenever I have more than one rst file
in a project, which automates further.

    Simon
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