Re: DocBook DTD


Stephane Bortzmeyer (bortzmeyer@pasteur.fr)
Wed, 12 Jan 2000 10:49:18 +0100


On Wednesday 12 January 2000, at 0 h 54, the keyboard of Martin Wheeler
<mwheeler@startext.co.uk> wrote:

> Very simple really -- the same as has been said by many others on this list:
> SGML is the only real practical route to take for any documentation project on

As pointed at the creation of this list, flame wars about documentation
formats are common enough, so you don't need to fuel them with such poses,
which are too obviously falsified by the facts (I don't know if someone made
actual measures but the most common documentation format, in the free sofwtare
world, is certainly Texinfo).

If you say that SGML is *better* (and, if you supply facts), we will certainly
agree because this is what I choosed too. But pretending that the
documentations written in other formats do not exist will not increase SGML
credibility, which is already very low in the free software world.

> Linuxdoc, debiandoc and other starter DTDs are just too lightweight to be of any
> real usefulness whatsoever.

Again, this is falsified by the facts. The Debian documentation is in
DebianDoc, *all* the HOWTO are in LinuxDoc and it works (it could work better
but saying that it is of "no real usefulness" is name-calling only).

> And of course the know-how to produce all the filters you might ever want is already
> available

[Off-topic: anyone knows a good - good quality of output, maintained and
documented DocBook->ASCII converter? Anyone suggesting HTML+'lynx -dump' will
be laughed at. Bunch of scripts written five years ago in Perl 4 with a README
of ten lines will be ignored, too.]

> The time has come to bite the bullet, and start the conversion process (hell, LDP
> is most of the way there already)

Not *one* HOWTO have been converted and maintained in DocBook form.



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