Re: [Docutils-develop] [PATCH] Optionally disable docinfo section

On Fri, 26 Jul 2002 22:56:16 -0400 David Goodger
<go...@us...> wrote:

> > I have added an option to disable inclusion of the docinfo section
> > in the generated documents.
> 
> What's the motivation?  (Why do you want to do this?  What purpose
> does it serve?)  I'd like to know because I suspect that this may not
> be the best solution.  It depends on what you want to do and why.  I'd
> rather hear it from you and not speculate.

The immediate goal of the option is to remove the bibliographic fields from
the output. The reason is mostly esthetic: while bibliographic information is
normally displayed when the document is used standalone and especially when it
is in printed (or equivalent, like ebook) form. However, with online content
you don't normally do this, but have that information hidden or put somewhere
else. I'm working on a website were a lot of documentation is presented, and
IMHO the bibliographic information is irrelevant there. Actually, I'm not
totally sure myself which is better in all contextes, but I thought it would
be a usefull option to have.

You can see the bibliographic fields as meta-information about the document:
it's information about the document, not part of the document itself. As such,
sometimes you might not want it in the output. For example, you can already
disable generator and time/datestamps, which are also metadata.   

> > You can see the relevant changes in the diffs below.  If nobody
> > objects, I would like to commit this to CVS...
> 
> The patch as it stands will *do* the processing, then throw it away
> (if --no-docinfo is passed).  Not very efficient, even for me ;-).

No, but that was the easiest place to put it since it required the least
code-digging. :-) Since the bibliographic fields are a very small part of the
whole document normally, I thought that it really didn't matter. But sure, the
clean way would be to disable the actual processing. 

> Also, the docinfo fields will be removed from the document entirely,
> losing information.  Do you want it all gone?  Why?

I don't want it to show up in the output (see above).
 
> Why not just leave the fields as a generic field list?  To do that,
> insert this before the first lines of
> docutils.transforms.frontmatter.DocInfo.transform::
> 
>     if not document.options.docinfo:
>         return

The intention is not to change the way the bibliographic fields are rendered,
but remove them from the output altogether (as said above) so this wouldn't
work.
 
---
Adam Chodorowski <ad...@ch...>

You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it 
turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
    -- Anne Lamott