On Wed, Dec 13, 2006 at 09:50:42PM +0000, W. Borgert wrote: > On Wed, Dec 13, 2006 at 02:20:28PM -0500, John Gabriele wrote: > > The policy draft mentions Texinfo (among some other formats) : > > http://www.us.debian.org/doc/manuals/ddp-policy/ch-manuals.en.html#s3.1 > > and notes DebianDoc's shortcomings which include not being able to > > include images or tables. Since Texinfo can do these things, and since > > it's been the GNU standard doc format for some time now, I'm just > > curious to hear what the rationale was for going with DebianDoc. > > I'm not sure about the history, as this was before my time as a > DD. Maybe LinuxDoc was taken, but changed for the purposes of > Debian. Most projects I'm aware of (e.g. Fedora, FreeBSD, GNOME, > KDE, Linux, PostgreSQL, SVN, S.u.S.E.) switched to DocBook XML > meanwhile and we should do the same. Not only is it the de-facto > standard, there are a lot of tools dealing with XML and creating > HTML, PDF, text, info, nroff, JavaHelp, MS-Help etc. from > DocBook. There are even "WYSIWYG" style editors (e.g. XXE, > unfortunately non-free), if someone prefers that. Images and > tables are supported, UTF-8 and multilanguage text are no > problem in the source, but are not understood by all backends. > I already transferred the devref to DocBook, but aba did not yet > switch to my version. There are rumours, that he has some other > small task to do :-)
Yes. XML is the way to go for the future. I have been lazy updating Debian Reference (SGML). I agree XML gives nice and simple source format for document which will be converted to several formats. But at the same time, wiki is nice tool to write such documents. I am using wiki now but once I finish it someday, I will convert them in XML form for package. wiki.debian.org is slow so I use local site as editor and mirror results there. http://wiki.debian.org/DebianReference Cheers, Osamu -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
