draft notice text

[Karsten Wade]

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.

Frankly, it was pretty daunting to imagine doing the XML toolchain all
ourselves.  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.

However, and here is the double-good news:  because of all the good work
we are doing here proving the capabilities and readiness of the latest
DocBook using XML, those of us who are writing new guides (i.e., no
legacy SGML) _and_ who are not being translated will get to choose to
use a parallel XML toolchain based on the FDP tools for the Enterprise
Linux 4 release ... well, probably nearly exactly the FDP tools with our
XSL or DSSSL (again, prepared to use DSSSL just in case we can't pull
the trigger on XSL in time).

That means I'm writing 100% in XML, as soon as I take the few hours to
convert my existing work from SGML. :-)

- Karsten
-- 
Karsten Wade, RHCE, Tech Writer
a lemon is just a melon in disguise
http://people.redhat.com/kwade/
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