On Wed, Dec 13, 2006 at 02:20:28PM -0500, John Gabriele wrote: > Anyhow, for my own docs I recently started using Texinfo, and I've > been quite happy with it. It actually surprised me to see that Debian > doesn't use Texinfo, and I was curious if anyone could explain to me > why the choice was made to not use it. Well "Debian" as such does use Texinfo. The Debian Documentation Project started years ago, at least as early as 1997, at the time the documentation produced included the FAQ the Installation Manual and another few manuals. At the time it was decided that SGML was a far better alternative than TeX or even Texinfo. It was the same road the Linux Documentation Project took and it was simpler for the project at the time (documents were simpler, requirements to tech writers were simpler and the generation of printed content was simpler too). At the time the 'debiandoc.dtd' was written. It was (and still is) minimalistic and oriented towards simple documentation. > 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. Currently we (as in "people writing and updating documentation") are working with Debiandoc-sgml or (docbook) XML documentation. Most documents are *still* using the first one and do not have a real need to switch to other formats. i18n/l10n support is very good supported even for non-occidental languages (in which Postscript and PDF conversion were issues that have been worked on and fixed) and, being simpler, it's easier to impose requisites for the auto-build system that is used to generate the content available in the website. Some new (or rewritten) documents start to use Docbook-xml since it can be used to write simple documents with plenty of interfaces, there's good i18n/l10n support and automatic generation of content issues have also been fixed. I don't think we'll see a change to using Texinfo in the future. Hope that clarifies the rationale for you. Regards Javier
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