Re: doc source format -- rationale
On Wed, Dec 13, 2006 at 02:20:28PM -0500, John Gabriele wrote:
> The policy draft mentions Texinfo (among some other formats) :
> http://www.us.debian.org/doc/manuals/ddp-policy/ch-manuals.en.html#s3.1
> and notes DebianDoc's shortcomings which include not being able to
> include images or tables. Since Texinfo can do these things, and since
> it's been the GNU standard doc format for some time now, I'm just
> curious to hear what the rationale was for going with DebianDoc.
I'm not sure about the history, as this was before my time as a
DD. Maybe LinuxDoc was taken, but changed for the purposes of
Debian. Most projects I'm aware of (e.g. Fedora, FreeBSD, GNOME,
KDE, Linux, PostgreSQL, SVN, S.u.S.E.) switched to DocBook XML
meanwhile and we should do the same. Not only is it the de-facto
standard, there are a lot of tools dealing with XML and creating
HTML, PDF, text, info, nroff, JavaHelp, MS-Help etc. from
DocBook. There are even "WYSIWYG" style editors (e.g. XXE,
unfortunately non-free), if someone prefers that. Images and
tables are supported, UTF-8 and multilanguage text are no
problem in the source, but are not understood by all backends.
I already transferred the devref to DocBook, but aba did not yet
switch to my version. There are rumours, that he has some other
small task to do :-)
Cheers,
--
W. Borgert <debacle@debian.org>, http://people.debian.org/~debacle/
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