On 10/25/18 8:23 PM, Chase via cdesktopenv-devel wrote:
Hi everyone,
I wanted to make a separate email thread directly about this topic, we
need to have an organized game plan on how to deal with dtdocbook going
forward. A few ideas have been brought up, now lets come to an
agreement. My personal thoughts on the subject are as follows, as some
of you may know, I am pretty adamant on keeping the original toolset to
the best of our abilities, however duplicate code and obsolete system
support are not included in that support. So I am highly against not
building the documentation, some of our documentation is better than
modern desktops today.
Well, not building the documentation does not mean that there will be no
documentation... The current documentation does not change, and probably
hasn't changed for over a decade at least.
I don't see a compelling reason, unless we are forced to do so due to
some platform issue/incompatibility that docs need to always be built
from scratch every time...
I think we should go forward as such:
Update our documentation to docbook 5.1 and any sgml files to xml
Use docbook-xsl to generate manpages as such:
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/maint-guide/dother.en.html#manpagexml
As I recalled this document from trying to package CDE for debian (still
an ongoing project, but migration to the gnu autotools is a must), I saw
the docbook-to-man program
(https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/docbook-to-man), and it turns out that
there has been a separately maintained fork of dbtoman split from the
CDE project. I am CCing the maintainer of it if he would like to take a
look at our copy of the code and pick out some contributions (tcl
support and whatnot).
That all sounds great, I have no objection to that.
But the primary issue is having someone with the skills/knowledge (or
learning them), and that someone having the the time to actually do it.
Even if all of the docs were already modernized, should we always
require that they be built?
To be honest, I don't even know if we would be able to get away with
shipping pre-built manpages, help, and dtinfo guides. This point may
all not even matter, if there is platform dependence in play.
As for now, I will not be touching dtdocbook at all until the conversion
to modern standards is finished. Thoughts?
For the short term, I will concentrate on just getting the utf8
conversion done (well, re-done), leaving the docs alone as much as
possible. I won't be able to touch anything for a week or two though at
the earliest anyway.
I agree there should be some consensus on whether to require that the
docs be built every time as part of building CDE, even if unnecessary.
My thought was just to make "World.doc" handle doc building, while
"World" just builds the core CDE and localization stuff and use prebuilt
docs for installation and runtime use.
PS: I didn't include the person you added to the CC line, as he could
not respond unless he subscribed to the list. I could not check out his
site either as all I get when I go there is a "500 Server error" message.
--
Jon Trulson
"In the game of chess, you can never let your adversary see your pieces."
- Zapp Brannigan
_______________________________________________
cdesktopenv-devel mailing list
cdesktopenv-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/cdesktopenv-devel
