[ANNOUNCE] xorg-sgml-doctools-1.2

[Ben Byer]

On Mar 4, 2007, at 2:41 PM, Gene Heskett wrote:

> On Sunday 04 March 2007, Daniel Stone wrote:
>> Users never deal with DocBook.  Full stop.
>
> Oh?  Maybe you should tell the packagers that, lots of stuff ships  
> with
> only a docbook subdir in the tree.

Which? What exactly are we talking about, here?

> [...]
>>>> So, I don't see any problem at all.
>>>
>>> Obviously you are privy to the secret incantations to make it  
>>> work.  I
>>> would like to join that club but my attempts to carve a working key
>>> have so far, been both very frustrating, and an utter failure.
>>
>> I can see why, because you're attempting to solve the wrong problem.
>>
>> As an aside, I tend to lose interest whenever I see 'M$'.   
>> Particularly
>> if the analogy makes no sense.
>>
> Mmmm, was not Framemaker an M$ product?  Popular back about the  
> same time
> FrontPage managed to break every browser on the planet that  
> expected w3c
> validated input?  Please correct me if that's not a correct  
> assumption on
> my part.

Try Adobe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FrameMaker

 From your later emails, it looks like you might have realized this,  
but just in case, I'll try:

DocBook is a compiler for documentation, much like GCC is a compiler  
for C code.  (Note that both of them have complicated command-line  
syntax!)

1. You (as a user) never see DocBook data; you get man pages (and  
sometimes online help in HTML).  Much like how users generally aren't  
expected to "run" C source files.

2. You (as a developer) use a text editor to edit the XML-format  
DocBook files without worrying about how to make pretty HTML or groff- 
formatter manpages, because DocBook takes care of it.

3. You (as someone who uses bleeding-edge source releases from git,  
etc) should just be able to run "./configure && make && make  
install", and it should magically make and install man pages for you.

Hope this helps -- #1 should work just fine; if #2 and #3 are  
problematic, then maybe we have some work left to do.
-b