[ANNOUNCE] xorg-sgml-doctools-1.2

[Gene Heskett]

On Sunday 04 March 2007, Daniel Stone wrote:
>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.  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 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.
>
>DocBook is not a format you read directly.  It can be converted into man
>pages, HTML, PDF, whatever.  You can read those manpages, with man.  It
>satisfies people looking for online, offline, and dead-tree
>documentation.
>
>At this stage, we haven't had any complaints from the people (person)
>working on our documentation, so their word is the only thing that
>counts.
>

ok, so how do _I_ co-erce the system into showing me this output?  An oft 
asked, but never answered question so far.  And its been asked 
intermittently, on many mailing lists, by me, for what 4 or 5 years now?  
If its so damned popular, why then can no one write a manpage describing 
how to use it?  Seems like a heck of a good question to me...

To paraphase the problem:
To get to the other side of a river, one must cross a bridge, but 
apparently the location of that bridge is a cartographers secret 
trademark error in the maps he publishes.

And I'm not consciously trying to be obnoxious, Daniel.  However it is 
becoming more and more frustrating that the tools all take hard to 
remember syntax, and one undotted i in the whole src file causes an exit 
with a generally meaningless error message.  Have enough mercy on us to 
at least wrap all this up in a bash script called 'manpage' or something 
similar which only needs $1 to point at the docbook formatted filename, 
located in a default directory for such files maintained in an agreed 
upon standard '/some/place' as manpages are now.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above
message by Gene Heskett are:
Copyright 2007 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.