Alright we seem to have slowed down in here, which means we've probably run out of ideas and steam to drive them.
Some of the reasons for bogging down seem to be over conflating origination of content with delivery of content. I'm not suggesting that that's what you're doing, I'd generally agree with the options available and personally straddle both the DocBook and database camps :-), but I think the two need to be kept entirely separate.
As a developer needing documentation I have very little interest in the delivery of content, I'd be happy with a bunch of text files so long as the content was accurate and easy to find. The emphasis is on easy to find so I for one would place high on the list a fast search engine, LXR pointed at the documentation would be fine.
So far as the delivery is concerned I think its important to deliver content in a variety of ways. There are still a great many people that suffer from phone connections at a per minute/second rate, providing only browsable material won't encourage those people to actually read the documentation.
There are also people of ancient grey matter such as myself that like to print things out, especially if they are formal specifications, I've yet to see a HTML presentation printed that wasn't badly laid out. Whilst PDF is truly awful at some things (pagination for example), it is a coherent package for printing material though the effort to get a reasonable result shouldn't be underestimated.
Thus I shall propose the following:
1). Those people who would like to see us use some form of cvs gateway for those who don't have cvs or don't know how to use it can contribute to the site, well you guys bring it to the table in a demonstratable form, and we'll all take a look. I have no objections to adding such a feature but it would be plain wrong to go off and develop it and then find we can't use it for whatever reason... It would be much better if only those interested in it were to try it first, the rest should concentrate on the html/css and perl side of it.
There already are gateways for cvs available with and without secure access.
2) The above also goes for the SGML/DocBook people. I just spoke to Dawn Endico who says that making everyone use DocBook is out of the question, but if parts of the site were available in such a form it would be great (obvious rationale there). So again, bring to the table a demonstratable system, and we'll look into making it work. That doesn't have to mean a team of people doing a html->docbook translation, it could mean a selected area html->docbook translation of say end-user documentation. Whatever.
I'm trying to understand what out of the question means. I can understand not all authors/contributors being willing to hack a DTR for their document, I can understand a little less that they wouldn't be able to insert <chapter> </chapter> tags and the like but I don't understand incorporating content (regardless of the structure used), without it conforming to a single recognised and supported structure. If there is no codifying of the content then the documentation is still going to be an unholy mess.
That means that if authors don't mark up their document in some way then someone else has to as I think has been pointed out.
Simon
S. P. Lucy
