Re: [gentoo-dev] added Gentoo-HOWTO

[<drobbins@gentoo.org>]

On Thu, Feb 22, 2001 at 06:03:52PM +0100, Achim Gottinger wrote:

> Daniel,

> What do you think about using docbook for these docs. The sgml-tools should
> work quite well and we can produce the following output formates: dvi html
> man pdf ps rtf tex texi txt.  We can add our own html-backend or an xml
> backend that can be used for xslt transformation.

Well, I'm not too familiar with the docbook syntax, but I took a quick look at
a sample docbook SGML document and I'm afraid that it would require a monstrous
amount of custom XSLT to get into the format that we want.

I agree that having a unified doc format that can generate man pages as well as
web documents is what we need.  Part of me thinks that it may be easier to
create our own man page conversion XSLT than it would be to create our web page
conversion docbook XSLT.

If I am going to be doing most of the documentation, then I'll most likely go
with a custom XML format.  If someone else wants to invest some time getting
our docs into docbook format (and handling the web page conversion issues),
then maybe we can go in that direction.

-- 
Daniel Robbins					<drobbins@gentoo.org>
President/CEO					http://www.gentoo.org 
Gentoo Technologies, Inc.