[ANNOUNCE] xorg-sgml-doctools-1.2
Ben Byer
bbyer at mm.st
Sun Mar 4 16:15:09 PST 2007
On Mar 4, 2007, at 2:41 PM, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Sunday 04 March 2007, Daniel Stone wrote:
>> Users never deal with DocBook. Full stop.
>
> Oh? Maybe you should tell the packagers that, lots of stuff ships
> with
> only a docbook subdir in the tree.
Which? What exactly are we talking about, here?
> [...]
>>>> 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.
>>
>> I can see why, because you're attempting to solve the wrong problem.
>>
>> As an aside, I tend to lose interest whenever I see 'M$'.
>> Particularly
>> if the analogy makes no sense.
>>
> Mmmm, was not Framemaker an M$ product? Popular back about the
> same time
> FrontPage managed to break every browser on the planet that
> expected w3c
> validated input? Please correct me if that's not a correct
> assumption on
> my part.
Try Adobe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FrameMaker
From your later emails, it looks like you might have realized this,
but just in case, I'll try:
DocBook is a compiler for documentation, much like GCC is a compiler
for C code. (Note that both of them have complicated command-line
syntax!)
1. You (as a user) never see DocBook data; you get man pages (and
sometimes online help in HTML). Much like how users generally aren't
expected to "run" C source files.
2. You (as a developer) use a text editor to edit the XML-format
DocBook files without worrying about how to make pretty HTML or groff-
formatter manpages, because DocBook takes care of it.
3. You (as someone who uses bleeding-edge source releases from git,
etc) should just be able to run "./configure && make && make
install", and it should magically make and install man pages for you.
Hope this helps -- #1 should work just fine; if #2 and #3 are
problematic, then maybe we have some work left to do.
-b
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