On Fri, 21 Jan 2000, Paul Hoffman wrote:

> >   This isn't true with POD or man pages.
> 
> Disagree. Book publishers can take formatted or unformatted text in and 
> turn it into a book. They do it all the time. They don't *like* doing it, 
> but they'll do it just fine, 

  It's certainly possible, but I don't consider "just convert this to
something I can use" to be "ready for publishing".  FrameMaker+SGML can
read DocBook directly.

> particularly for a not-heavily-formatted book such as this one will be. 

  But it *should* be heavily formatted.  I can't think of any type of book
that would need more formatting then technical documentation.

> > While SGML isn't trivial to learn,
> 
> UNDERSTATEMENT ALERT! :-)

  Maybe a little, but SGML is really not that difficult, especially from
an authors POV (writing DTDs and stylesheets are a little more
challenging, but most people will not be doing this).

> I truly think you're overengineering the problem and will possibly drive
> away contributors. 

  This type of project is *exactly* what DocBook is designed for.  pod and
roff are nice for writing man pages (especially pod), but when you want to
publish to multiple media you really want more markup.

> Actually, I disagree. I think we should shoot for *after* the 1.5 release 
> so that we're sure that it is correct for 1.5. There's nothing more 
> frustrating to a novice user than to get a set of installation instructions 
> that are wrong (but were supposed to be right but the darn developers 
> changed something near the end...).

  Hmm... I guess you're right.  It is best to err on the side of caution
with such a major change.  And if 2.0 is the next release after 1.5, that
would be a great time to introduce the new documentation.

Matthew Orgass
darkstar@pgh.net