Re: Everyone go have a beer.

[Karl Fogel <kf...@galois.collab.net>]

"Eric S. Raymond" <es...@thyrsus.com> writes:
> Are you guys attached to using texinfo as a document format?  A lot
> of projects are moving to DocBook these days.  I can work in either
> but prefer the latter.

I had a long-term horrible experience with DocBook a while back.  Nice
format, maybe, but the tools were very immature and basically required
a full-time support person to answer people's questions, fix
installation issues, and write Makefiles.  (And we're talking about a
group of clueful developers here, each of whom already knew multiple
structured markup languages.)

Maybe things have changed since then... but if they haven't, do you
really want to be that full-time support person? :-)

Texinfo does seem to be sufficient for what we're doing.

-K

Re: Everyone go have a beer.

[Karl Fogel <kf...@galois.collab.net>]

"Eric S. Raymond" <es...@thyrsus.com> writes:
> (Would it help if I wrote texi2docbook?  I've been thinking about
> doing this anyway in order to convert the Jargon File.)

That would probably help a lot. :-)

No promises, of course, since conversion implies an ongoing
committment to learn YAML, which is a conversation all the developers
would need to have before a switch can happen.

-K

Re: Everyone go have a beer.

["Deven T. Corzine" <de...@ties.org>]

On Tue, 27 Feb 2001, Eric S. Raymond wrote:

> (Would it help if I wrote texi2docbook?  I've been thinking about
> doing this anyway in order to convert the Jargon File.)

Whether or not it helps the Subversion project, it's bound to help someone,
especially if DocBook really is better.  There's a lot of Texinfo stuff out
there already, and a good conversion utility would make people more willing
to try DocBook with minimal risk...

Besides, if it will also help you with the Jargon File, do you even need to
ask?  Scratch that itch!  ;-)

Deven

Re: Everyone go have a beer.

["Eric S. Raymond" <es...@thyrsus.com>]

Karl Fogel <kf...@galois.ch.collab.net>:
> I had a long-term horrible experience with DocBook a while back.  Nice
> format, maybe, but the tools were very immature and basically required
> a full-time support person to answer people's questions, fix
> installation issues, and write Makefiles.  (And we're talking about a
> group of clueful developers here, each of whom already knew multiple
> structured markup languages.)
> 
> Maybe things have changed since then... but if they haven't, do you
> really want to be that full-time support person? :-)
> 
> Texinfo does seem to be sufficient for what we're doing.

I sympathize.  Until recently the DocBook toolchain *was* pretty crappy.

They finally got their act together about six months back, I migrated
all my FAQs and documents along about December, and I haven't
regretted it once.  All my SGML-tools documents have been converted.
I don't use Texinfo for new projects any more, and if it weren't for
the Jargon File I'd be out of Texinfo-land entirely.  Not that I 
dislike the format, especially, but DocBook webifies better.  And
there's a larger issue of integrated documentation...

Texinfo almost certainly sufficient for what *this* project is doing.
The real advantage of DocBook is that it would play better with what *other*
projects are doing -- GNOME, KDE, the Linux kernel itself.  The 
combination of DocBook and the Open Metadata Format standard points
us towards a world in which installing a package will add its docs
into a searchable, fully hyperlinked site database that can be 
viewed through anything HTTP-capable.

This is what info was supposed to do, but better.  Texinfo was a brave
try for 1985 and I've done entire books in it, but its day is done.  I
respectfully recommend that you guys at least consider moving to
DocBook.

(Would it help if I wrote texi2docbook?  I've been thinking about
doing this anyway in order to convert the Jargon File.)
-- 
		<a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies
to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule--and
both commonly succeed, and are right... The United States
has never developed an aristocracy really disinterested or an
intelligentsia really intelligent. Its history is simply a record
of vacillations between two gangs of frauds. 
	--- H. L. Mencken