Questions regarding my man/info summer project

Ville-Pekka Vainio vpivaini at cs.helsinki.fi
Tue Jun 26 14:32:13 UTC 2007


Tim Waugh kirjoitti viestissään (lähetysaika tiistai, 26. kesäkuu 2007 
15:27:33):
> If there is any possibility of using DocBook for the source format,
> don't forget ESR's excellent doclifter package.  It does a really good
> job of translating man pages into DocBook -- and of course we already
> have the stylesheets to translate them back to groff format.
>
> Tim.
> */

That's what I'm using now and according to my tests it works really well. This 
is how I'm going to implement the publication phase. But for editing, I think 
DocBook might be a bit intimidating for users who are accustomed to wiki 
markup.

That's why the idea currently is to use wiki markup as the source format, then 
translate that into DocBook with (probably) the improved DocBook code from 
last year's GSoC and then that DocBook into any other format needed.

But then the "life cycle" of a man page would be something like groff -> wiki 
markup -> DocBook -> groff (or some other upstream format). And 
guaranteeing "no loss of information" between three transformations is going 
to be difficult.

So should the idea of using wiki markup be discarded completely? Should we use 
DocBook as the source format and hope that people won't be too scared of 
editing it? If we chose DocBook, we would have to do only two 
transformations, groff -> DocBook -> groff, and guaranteeing consistency 
would be much more simple.

-- 
Ville-Pekka Vainio
vpivaini at cs.helsinki.fi




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