[ANNOUNCE] xorg-sgml-doctools-1.2

Gene Heskett gene.heskett at verizon.net
Sun Mar 4 14:36:01 PST 2007


On Sunday 04 March 2007, Gene Heskett wrote:
>On Sunday 04 March 2007, Daniel Stone wrote:
>>On Sun, Mar 04, 2007 at 04:15:13PM -0500, Gene Heskett wrote:
>>> On Sunday 04 March 2007, Daniel Stone wrote:
>>> >I can see you're not trying to be obnoxious, but are you honestly
>>> >arguing for manpages instead of DocBook as the raw format, on the
>>> >grounds of 'hard to remember syntax'?
>>>
>>> Yes Daniel.  Any format that takes 3 or more command line arguments,
>>> and at least 2 separate incantations of disparate utilities just to
>>> do the equ of a 'man name' is going to be extremely counterintuitive.
>>> Particularly for a newbie, and I've been running linux since rh5.1
>>> days.
>>
>>Okay, and you're missing the point.  DocBook is _not_ the final format.
>>It is used to generate HTML, PDF, roff, etc.  You write documentation
>> in DocBook, and users type man whatever.
>
>That has never worked here.  Example:
>[root at coyote ~]# man docbook-utils
>No manual entry for docbook-utils
>
>So where IS the bridge that will teach the user how to use it?

Possibly I may have found some help, it seems there are manpages for such 
as docbook2man, but I had to see them in the filelist smart --gui 
displays before I knew they were there.  Now I'm studying that manpage, 
which seems to be the universal docbook2anything page..
And maybe I can quit squawking now if I can make sense of this.  With a 
sample protoype cli that's nearly 80 chars long I can see I'll have to 
consult it everytime till I get it into my well aged (its been here 72 
rounds now, but its still keeping a couple of tv stations on the air) wet 
ram.

>>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.

-- 
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.



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