discuss: future of the doctool in node core

[addaleax]

Occasionally when talking about the doctool, a few questions pop up:

• Should the doctool, in the long run, stay part of the Node core repository?
• Is the current situation of it having all doctool dependencies checked in reasonable?
• What changes are necessary and what changes are helpful for larger future changes, e.g. generating docs for the topic documents/guides/etc.?

I’d like it if we could work out answers to these questions here.

Some things to consider:

• In its current state, the doctool could just as well create docs for other projects, and only few things are tailored to be specific to Node core
• Large parts of the doctool’s dependencies are shared with eslint, so they are already checked in in the repository
• The doctool’s automated tests provide Node core with a minimal, regularly run test for a “real-world” application
• The doctool should work with older Node versions back to v4, e.g. for the doc-only Makefile target, although that’s not being tested currently
• The current dependency for markdown parsing, marked, is effectively not maintained anymore
• Changes to the doctool to support specific features needed for our documentation files themselves don’t happen very often anymore

Refs: e.g. #6495, #6974, #5408
/cc @nodejs/documentation and specifically @eljefedelrodeodeljefe

[addaleax]

Closing due to lack of follow-up