[publican-list] Publican 3.0 -- with DocBook 5 or without?

[Jeff Fearn]

On 06/28/2011 02:47 PM, Ruediger Landmann wrote:
> Hey all;
>
> It's been six months since our last release and the bugfixes have been
> piling up, along with a few major enhancements. We'd like to ship
> Publican 3.0 sometime soon.
>
> However, we also face a major design decision. Publican was designed to
> support DocBook 4; now that DocBook 5 is out, do we want to move
> Publican to use that instead?
>
> Since we'll need new, separate stylesheets for DocBook 5, supporting
> both versions of the schema would require more maintenance than we're
> able to provide. It really has to be one or the other.
>
> The single biggest reason to move to DocBook 5 is that DocBook 4 is now
> feature-frozen and in maintenance mode; the DocBook project's energies
> are going into DocBook 5.[1]
>
> Against that, the new style sheets will create the potential for
> breakage. Documents will need careful checking to make sure that they
> render properly. This will require effort from everyone in the community.
>
> We need to know that Publican userbase is going to help find the
> inevitable problems and file bugs when they do.
>
> Opinions please, people?

Since moving from DB4->DB5 is a big effort it's unlikely we'd release P3 
without DB5, and then begin working on it right away. This decision is 
effectively deciding if we should move to DB5 in 2011.

A lot of the effort we currently exert is for the section 508 compliance 
changes, if we move to DB5 I think we should drop this effort and refer 
any accessibility issues raised, or patches we come up with, upstream. 
Doing this reduces the effort to get DB5 ready by a significant degree.

Cheers, Jeff.