FreeLists / openbeos / [openbeos] Re: Checkins

[Michael Phipps <mphipps1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I probably should let a sleeping dog lie...

Lots of people have suggested this. No one has said "I'll do it". Secondly, 
we have all of the manpages from all of the GNU tools (and that is, what, 
100, roughly?). HTML is trivial to make from nroff. XML is not, AFAIK. 
Thirdly, many people (myself included) aren't XML gurus. Now, I like learning 
new stuff. I have learned enough from OBOS to (IMHO) constitute a Master's in 
Management and a Master's in CS. But XML (not in theory, but in detail) looks 
pretty big. Not too hard, but pretty big. Tagged data is tagged data. But 
there is XML, XSLT, the applications that process them, maybe enough NROFF to 
go from XML->man pages, etc. Then someone has to go through all of those 
manpages and add in the tags. Because NROFF is, AFAIK, page 
description/layout, not metatags. 

What is described here might make sense if we had all new documentation to 
write. We don't. We have manpages to rework and a BeBook to re-work. 

That isn't to say that I am opposed, as such. But I can't think that 
converting all of this documentation to uber-format is high on anyone's 
priority list. Now, if some one(s) came along who were not coders but were 
carrying the XML banner and took all of those manpages and did the 
conversions themselves and presented us with a pretty package with a red bow 
on top, both we and the GNU community would be greatly enriched. 

Until that happens, we will stay with nroff and HTML. :-)


On 2004-03-10 at 06:40:44 [-0500], David Tremblay wrote:
> Michael Phipps wrote:
> 
> >Yes, the man pages are there.
> >  
> >
> The lurker just get out of its bed  and will go bed right after it. But 
> because you were talking about documentation it makes me wake up.
> 
> Why not use straight XML so you could process it through xslt with all the 
> available tools (docbook, dita, infomaps etc.) and have the format you want 
> (man page, HTML, PDF and on and on)
> We call that "single-sourcing" ma'
> 
> Back to bed now
> 
> David