Re: debiandoc-sgml vs. docbook
On 23 Nov 1998, Michael Alan Dorman wrote:
> I won't learn debiandoc-sgml. It's application is so ridiculously
> limited, I wouldn't ever be able to justify the outlay in time.
DebianDoc can be learned in half an hour from its manual. DocBook takes
days, and oddly enough doesn't appear to be documented very well (I've
seen a reference but no clear tutorial on how to use it - Mark Galassi's
isn't complete enough AFAICT).
So from the standpoint of someone who knows neither, DebianDoc is nicer.
It only has maybe 20 or 30 tags, and they are all really obvious.
> Furthermore, based on statements Ian made at the time of its
> introduction, it's big benefit was that it gave better postscript
> output. Of course, to this end, it uses lout, which, when I was
> working on the early days of the alpha port 18 months ago, had no
> active maintainer. In fact, glancing at the changelog, I see that it
> *still* has no active maintainer, and hasn't been touched in more than
> a year.
>
Yeah, the lout output was yucky. It has LaTeX now. It also has texinfo,
which DocBook still lacks.
At this time, the main disadvantage of DebianDoc is that it lacks some
features, like indexing and (I think?) including figures/graphics. I think
it is planned to implement them though.
Havoc
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