Bug#185295: marked as done (RFP: docbook2x -- converts DocBook documents into man pages and Texinfo documents)
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>From dparsons@emerall.com Tue Mar 18 07:43:03 2003
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From: Drew Parsons <dparsons@debian.org>
To: Debian Bug Tracking System <submit@bugs.debian.org>
Subject: RFP: docbook2x -- converts DocBook documents into man pages and
Texinfo documents
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2003 00:43:00 +1100
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Package: wnpp
Version: unavailable; reported 2003-03-19
Severity: wishlist
* Package name : docbook2x
Version : 0.7.0
Upstream Author : Steve Cheng <stevecheng@users.sourceforge.net>
* URL : http://sourceforge.net/projects/docbook2x/
* License : GPL
Description : converts DocBook documents into man pages and Texinfo
docbook2X converts DocBook documents into man pages and
Texinfo documents.
.
It aims to support DocBook version 4.1, excepting the features that
cannot be supported or are unlikely to be useful for a man-page or
Texinfo rendering.
=====================================================
Motivation for this package:
In Debian we are encouraged to use DocBook to create man pages for our
binaries, since this provides the greatest flexibility for converting the
documentation to any number of various formats: HTML, info, PDF, TeX, as
well as man page format.
However, while there are a number of different stylesheets and packages
available for converting to most of these formats, there is currently in
Debian only one which converts DocBook to a man page, docbook-to-man.
(xmltoman has also recently arrived in the archive, but it is based on an
unpublished proprietry XML DTD, rather than using DocBook).
There are problems with docbook-to-man. It is not maintained upstream (has
not been touched since June 14, 1996), and is buggy in a number of ways. Not
all DocBook information is adequately converted to the man page, there are
errors closing scope of nroff fields in the man page. Conversion is
performed using some opaque table system called transpec that seems to make
maintenance difficult in principle. Newer versions of DocBook (in
particular, the new XML based edition) are not supported.
docbook2X seems to deal with all of these inadequacies in docbook-to-man.
Although not actively maintained, it is more recent (2001-08-05). It
handles both XML and SGML versions of DocBook (the tools assume XML, and
provide a command line option to choose SGML). The formatting problem and
data loss problems of docbook-to-man are not present. The system is written
in perl and therefore accessible to moderately competent programmers.
Currently the system requires a minor degree of perl tweaking to fit in with
Debian's perl setup. I can provide my own hacks if you require them.
docbook2X also has two parts for "historical reasons", one (docbook2manxml)
to convert DocBook to an intermediate XML manpage format, and the other
(db2x_manxml) to convert from that XML format to the final man page (nroff
output). I would recommend providing a glue script to run both these
commands transparently to provide one command for users to run. This might
also require a small degree of perl hacking to get the two docbook2X
commands writing pipewise to stdout by default rather than writing to file
by default (I can provide my preliminary changes).
Note that the SourceForge project page for docbook2X refers to two projects,
docbook2X and docbook2man-sgmlspl. The latter appears to be an experimental
attempt to provide another DocBook-to-man convertor, but it seems unfinished
and has problems distinguishing XML from SGML. docbook2X is the project we
want to use. In fact the docbook2man-sgmlspl docs say "New projects are
recommended to use docbook2manxml from docbook2X (a separate package)
instead, which is superior to this tool."
I don't feel I have enough time right now to finish this package up myself,
but I think it would be extremely beneficial to us. Maybe I'll get time for
it later if no one steps in before then.
I hope others agree this package is worthwhile.
Drew Parsons
-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
Architecture: i386
Kernel: Linux strider 2.4.20 #1 Sun Feb 16 17:54:41 EST 2003 i686
Locale: LANG=en_AU.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_AU.UTF-8
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Received: (at 185295-done) by bugs.debian.org; 29 Apr 2004 06:07:45 +0000
>From rafael@mpipf-muenchen.mpg.de Wed Apr 28 23:07:45 2004
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Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2004 08:06:48 +0200
From: Rafael Laboissiere <rafael@debian.org>
To: 185295-done@bugs.debian.org
Cc: Debian XML/SGML Group <debian-xml-sgml-pkgs@lists.alioth.debian.org>
Subject: docbook2x is available in unstable
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I am closing this RFP, because docbook2x is already in unstable.
--
Rafael
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