[PULL] linuxdoc, other build fixes

Dan Nicholson dbn.lists at gmail.com
Tue Apr 27 09:20:16 PDT 2010


On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 7:58 AM, Alan Coopersmith
<alan.coopersmith at oracle.com> wrote:
> Gaetan Nadon wrote:
>> The root cause is simple: not all platforms have the tools to generate
>> the docs. There maybe a solution: unlike executable code, docs do not
>> need to be built on all platforms. A "doc only" tarball could be
>> produced and posted like any other package.
>
> The long term solution we've desired for other reasons is to reduce the
> number of documentation formats we use and tools we require.   We've long
> ago said (at least informally) that we consider LinuxDoc deprecated and
> that it's still in our tree only because no one has had the time to translate
> those documents to DocBook.   When X.Org first started we had planned on
> standardizing on DocBook/XML, though more recently there have been suggestions
> toward standardizing on something more user friendly like AsciiDoc that can
> be translated to DocBook and thus output the desired end results (.txt, .html,
> .pdf) via the same tools.

FWIW, I've been poking at converting the linuxdoc sources in the
server to docbook xml. There are only 3 of them, but dmx.sgml and
DESIGN.sgml are large documents. The formats are similar, but it's a
pretty manual process (especially since linuxdoc allows lots of
behavior that's not valid xml). If anyone knows any automatic
translators from linuxdoc to docbook, let me know.

--
Dan


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