Re: debiandoc-sgml vs. docbook
In article <[🔎] 87hfvq1dr6.fsf_-_@mdorman.law.miami.edu>, Michael Alan Dorman <mdorman-debian-policy@debian.org> writes:
> 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. My
> entire reaction when Ian first introduced it was to smack my head
> and say, "Why?" since then it was a nigh-gratuitous divergence from
> linuxdoc, which was already a fork from the qwertz DTD.
I guess that's reasonable, but others (including me) disagree.
BTW, it would be relatively trivial to transform debiandoc SGML files
to docbook if someone cared to (using either jade's flavor of dsssl
tranformation).
> 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.
Lets separate, if we can, the DTD from the processing structure.
There's no reason why we could not build a DSSSL file make nice PS,
PDF, TeX, RTF from the Debiandoc DTD. In fact, it's my project for a
rainy day...
No DTD is inherently connected with any output processing system....
> Any or all of this may have changed, and I may just be being a crank
> about this---but I know that by using this specialized DTD, Debian
> has virtually guaranteed I will never update the documents written
> in it. I suspect I'm not the only one.
I can understand why you turn your nose up at the Debiandoc DTD, but
for every one of you, if we went to Docbook, we'd have 10 people
complaining that our documentation system is too complex.
Just MHO.
--
.....Adam Di Carlo....adam@onShore.com.....<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>
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