[ANNOUNCE] xorg-sgml-doctools-1.2

[David Nusinow]

On Sun, Mar 04, 2007 at 02:21:18PM -0500, Gene Heskett wrote:
> And I'll submit again, that the 'docbook' format was a solution looking 
> for a problem, but the docbook promoters have never realized that it IS 
> the problem.  

In this case, the problem was "I need to work on the release notes, but I
can't build them. Also need to be able to generate html for the web and
text for distribution at a bare minumum from the same file." docbook was
the solution. Magically, it works. The conversion was also fairly easy,
which was a major point in its favor over xml, markdown, or anything
similar. I'm interested in alternate formats (and it's generally agreed
that xml docbook is the way to go) but the primary goal was to be able to
build the relnotes so that I could actually write them.

> I have all those tools, or did have before I freshly 
> installed FC6 about 4 months ago, configured according to the directions 
> I was able to wheedle from the mailing lists, and frankly no one seemed 
> to know much more than I did about this 'docbook' format of file, or how 
> to actually read it.  I have never been able to type the docbook equ of 
> a 'man someprogram' and get a readable screen out of it, even when trying 
> to give it every argument that made any sense at all on the cli.

I see a lot of words here strung together, but they don't make any sense
when I read them as a whole. Is moving from one sgml schema to another
really so incomprehensible?

> I will stop denegrating this docbook flood of nonsense BS when I can 
> type 'docbook procmailrc' and read it, till then please give us simple, 
> easily read manpages.  Stop hiding the docs for this stuff behind an 
> impenetrable curtain of gobbledygook, far worse that trying to read an 
> html email as plaintext.

docbook2man and docbook2txt are probably what you're looking for if you
have trouble reading structured markup.

 - David Nusinow