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DocBook vs. DebianDoc



Disclaimer: This isn't intended as a troll, or as the start of a
lengthy flame war! However, a well-reasoned discussion would be
welcome; alternatively, pointers to previous discussions so that
we can avoid revisiting the whole issue would be welcome.

I have searched for any recent discussions of DebianDoc/SGML
vs. DocBook/XML as the Debian documentation standards, and have
had little success.

The primary reason I inquire: I've often been frustrated trying
to find information in the DDR and policy manual, and I've often
told myself I would write a combined index for those documents to
make life easier for myself and others.

However, there doesn't seem to be a straightforward way to create
indices with DebianDoc.

I also noted that one of the current issues on the topics page is
Internationalization. This is a realm in which going with DocBook
may make life easier. Quoting from
http://www.oreilly.com/frank/oscon_summit.html:

"One of the key characteristics of any open source solution is
that it has to be able to express every important distinction
across many environments, technologies, formats, and
languages. Nik Clayton, who heads the FreeBSD documentation
efforts, noted the many languages into which FreeBDS [sic]
documentation is translated. Only DocBook could store sufficient
information to satisfy all those needs."

Also...

"The major conclusion reached by attendees was to standardize on
DocBook/XML as the canonical format for open source
documentation. The role of DocBook, however, is to be the storage
and exchange format. Different documentation groups will use it
in different ways, but all will provide some form of their
documents in a standard DocBook format."

Anyway, I'll stop with the advocacy. This note really was
intended to be a query.

-John Daily
john@geekhavoc.com



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