<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 TRANSITIONAL//EN"> <HTML> <HEAD> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; CHARSET=UTF-8"> <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="GtkHTML/3.26.0"> </HEAD> <BODY> On Tue, 2010-04-27 at 07:58 -0700, Alan Coopersmith wrote: <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE> <PRE> Gaetan Nadon wrote: > The root cause is simple: not all platforms have the tools to generate > the docs. There maybe a solution: unlike executable code, docs do not > need to be built on all platforms. A "doc only" tarball could be > produced and posted like any other package. The long term solution we've desired for other reasons is to reduce the number of documentation formats we use and tools we require. We've long ago said (at least informally) that we consider LinuxDoc deprecated and that it's still in our tree only because no one has had the time to translate those documents to DocBook. When X.Org first started we had planned on standardizing on DocBook/XML, though more recently there have been suggestions toward standardizing on something more user friendly like AsciiDoc that can be translated to DocBook and thus output the desired end results (.txt, .html, .pdf) via the same tools. </PRE> </BLOCKQUOTE> As long as the tools are available on all platforms. This isn't the case for xmlto or doxygen or even perhaps for asciidoc. The discussion right now is on Linuxdoc, but the same problem exists in every package where we distribute generated files. I think too much effort goes into maintaining this workaround. I have always seen docs being built separately.<BR> <BR> I meant to ask this for a while, but wouldn't the "Open Document Format for Office Applications" be a good choice? The converter docbook2odf would the job, according to the marketing brochure. </BODY> </HTML>