I'd like to know what the Derby community thinks about the possibility
of changing the source format of the Derby documentation from DITA to
DocBook and using a different build system. DocBook is a schema that can
use an XML DTD, like that of DITA; see http://www.docbook.org/ for more
information.
Our DITA toolkit has some problems that the Derby community hasn't been
able to solve with our current level of resources:
- It does not allow us to create book indexes or to create live links
between manuals. The feedback we've received is that this makes the
documentation hard to use.
- Links to tables usually don't work in the PDF or HTML Book versions.
- Building the PDF and HTML Book versions of the docs causes errors and
warnings that we can't seem to get rid of.
Conversion of the documentation source to DocBook would be a one-time
task that I'd be willing to take on. I can also use an existing DocBook
build system that, like the DITA toolkit, uses only freely available
open-source tools. The only change is that it would need to convert from
Gnu make to Ant to be compatible with the Apache license. The goal would
be to make it no more difficult to build the documentation than it is
today (and ideally easier). I would hope to complete the project for the
next release of Derby (10.5).
Before I explore these possibilities further, I'd like feedback from the
community. It seems that few people are currently working on the Derby
documentation, but many of you are using it. I would be grateful for
your thoughts.
Kim Haase
