draft notice text

[Dave Pawson]

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