There has been a lot of progress on docs in March. Jeff announced the result of the derby community's vote to accept DITA as the source format: http://mail-archives.eu.apache.org/mod_mbox/db-derby-dev/200503.mbox/[EMAIL PROTECTED]) . Andrew announced the result of the vote to put the source docs into a new derby/docs module: http://mail-archives.eu.apache.org/mod_mbox/db-derby-dev/200503.mbox/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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More work is in the pipe, including work on a forrest dita plug-in to make production of html and pdf easier. See the thread that starts on http://mail-archives.eu.apache.org/mod_mbox/db-derby-dev/200503.mbox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] .
In the meantime, I agree we should start posting PDFs to the web site, even though at the beginning they might fall short of the desires stated in http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/DERBY-79 . Good reasons include
doc updates from Jira issues are making it into the DITA source, so docs built from DITA source will be more current than the html pages currently out there.
And if anyone has expertise to help achieve DERBY-79 goals, please dive in!
-jean
Anthony Krinsky wrote:
Please forgive me if this is off-topic.
I am an Hypersonic user and Derby newbie attempting to do a feasibility analysis for using Derby for a specific customer requirement. After spending 2 hours futzing with the DITA pdf "cookbook" on the site I gave up and solicited Jeff Levitt for the files - he kindly obliged.
At the risk of upsetting DITA folks, there seems to be a principle tested here to the detriment of potential Derby adopters. Time spent building these files could be spent learning and using the product.
Until DITA authoring tools are widely and freely available, and building DITA projects into PDF files which may be easily printed, is painless, I would urge the powers that be here to post the PDF files to the site. Jeff is self-deprecating about the quality of his XSL output - but I can tell you his PDFs are much better than the nothing I was printing out yesterday.
IMO, posting PDF files with builds does not in any way detract from the DITA value-proposition per se.
Thank you kindly,
Anthony
