Re: apt man pages
On Thu, 13 Nov 2003, Richard Bos wrote:
> While updating the documentation I come across some strange looking sgml and
> I'm wundering and want to learn why that is, e.g. <command/apt-cdrom/ were I
> expect: <command>apt-cdrom</command>.
This is valid SGML, it's called short tags IIRC.
I finally went and look what is up with this today, and the answer is that
the Debian mantainer of the docbook package has opted to disable the
DTDDECL file that comes with docbook. The default file disables all the
markup minimization features that are used in the APT SGML documents.
So, the documents are not valid according to the DTD that Oasis
publishes which is why they don't validate on your suse box.
See the file debian/README.docbook.dcl in the docbook source package for
the explanation.
I think a patch to correct the docbook SGML documents is probably a good
idea.
I don't know of any tool that will normalize the markup without mangling
the indentation in the document. sgmlnorm (run on a system with the
mangled DTDTYPE) will remove all tag minimization (and also expand
entities, etc), but the resulting output is too mangled to be useful.
Jason
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