On Sat, 2004-09-18 at 19:06, Karsten Wade wrote:
On Sat, 2004-09-18 at 05:24, Dave Pawson wrote:
> What rationale is there for remaining with the SGML toolchain?
Ironically, the same reason that businesses worldwide stick with
old-but-working systems, where working == we hacked it to work well
enough to ship.
For the time to produce Enterprise Linux 4, we didn't have enough cycles
to do the R&D ourselves and start writing our guides for the next
release. There are significant cross-team constraints, such as having
percentages of guides string and code frozen for the translation team to
work on.
I gather you're speaking for rhel Karsten?
I'm asking about fc2,3.
Frankly, it was pretty daunting to imagine doing the XML toolchain all
ourselves.
It was done for you, open src, 5 years ago.
At the time that we had to choose go/no-go on switching to
XML, there were too many problems in the community tools (xmlto PDF
conversion being a big one, iirc), so we had to stick with SGML. Once
we started working in SGML for the production release, we had to stick
with it all the way through until release.
I made those decisions in 99. Why has it
taken so long for rh to review
them? Are they really so 'big blue bound'?
That means I'm writing 100% in XML, as soon as I take the few hours to
convert my existing work from SGML. :-)
Take a look at James Clarks sx. It works.
The XML docbook toolchain started in 98.
I see no call for pdf in fc2? So fop shouldn't be a blocker,
though its probably more than good enough for our use should pdf be
wanted.
--
Regards DaveP.
XSLT&Docbook FAQ
http://www.dpawson.co.uk/xsl