Where does forrest responsibility stop?

[Peter Donald <pe...@apache.org>]

Hi,

I would like to know where everyone believes forrests responsibility ends. For 
example, in most projects I work on we have several bits of documentation 
generated.

* website (in scope)
* manual (in scope)

* announcements (50/50?)
 ie basically blocks of text ready to be cut-n-pasted 
 into email announcements or the various freshmeat 
 style directories.

* headers/footers for download directory (50/50?)
 ie basically snippets of html that are put at top
 or bottom of page in download directorys. See for example
 http://jakarta.apache.org/builds/jakarta-avalon/release/framework/v4.1.3/

* code doc presentation (out of scope?)
 ie javadoc sytle stuff gets spit out as xml and then forrest styles em

* report presentation (out of scope?)
 ie reports get prepared by some process and then forrest styles em 

I guess my question is how do we go about using one of these other systems.

* Do we integrate with ant/maven/centipede and then re-run forrest everytime 
one of those other docs need to be generated? (ie push)
* Do we get Cocoon to "suck" the data through ? (ie pull)
* Do we get some sort of incremental build?

something else?

BTW if you decide that headers/footers or announcements are in scope then I 
have some xsl sheets to convert across ;)

-- 
Cheers,

Peter Donald
*------------------------------------------------------*
| "Common sense is the collection of prejudices        |
|  acquired by age 18. " -Albert Einstein              |
*------------------------------------------------------* 

Re: Where does forrest responsibility stop?

[David Crossley <cr...@indexgeo.com.au>]

Peter Donald wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I would like to know where everyone believes forrests responsibility ends. For 
> example, in most projects I work on we have several bits of documentation 
> generated.
> 
> * website (in scope)
> * manual (in scope)
> 
> * announcements (50/50?)
>  ie basically blocks of text ready to be cut-n-pasted 
>  into email announcements or the various freshmeat 
>  style directories.
> 
> * headers/footers for download directory (50/50?)
>  ie basically snippets of html that are put at top
>  or bottom of page in download directorys. See for example
>  http://jakarta.apache.org/builds/jakarta-avalon/release/framework/v4.1.3/
> 
> * code doc presentation (out of scope?)
>  ie javadoc sytle stuff gets spit out as xml and then forrest styles em
> 
> * report presentation (out of scope?)
>  ie reports get prepared by some process and then forrest styles em 

I reckon that all of these things are *in scope*. 100%

> I guess my question is how do we go about using one of these other systems.
> 
> * Do we integrate with ant/maven/centipede and then re-run forrest everytime 
> one of those other docs need to be generated? (ie push)
> * Do we get Cocoon to "suck" the data through ? (ie pull)
> * Do we get some sort of incremental build?
> 
> something else?

Perhaps Forrest should have many means of obtaining input.
How would we specify what Forrest needs to do? There are some
old threads in forrest-dev about "siteplan.xml" config file.
Perhaps that is the way.

"Incremental build" sounds interesting. Do you mean to address
the fact that there is no need to re-build an entire website
just because one bit of content has changed in one xdoc?

> BTW if you decide that headers/footers or announcements are in scope then I 
> have some xsl sheets to convert across ;)

Great. Header/footer is something that we need now for
the new xml-commons website which is in draft stage using
Forrest.

However, Forrest needs to define a way to deal consistently
with all of these new capabilities and other dreams.

--David