At 08:35 PM 1/21/00 -0500, Matthew Orgass wrote:
>   The benefit of DocBook is that the documentation is ready for
>publishing.

Agreed.

>   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, particularly for a not-heavily-formatted book 
such as this one will be. (I speak from experience here; I've written about 
15 computer books over the last 16 years...)

>   While SGML isn't
>trivial to learn,

UNDERSTATEMENT ALERT! :-)

>  I think that a detailed guide to how it should be used
>for NetBSD documentation would make it easy enough to learn.  Those who
>don't want to learn it can submit additions or corrections as text and let
>others translate.

That could be done, but it could be more easily done for POD. I truly think 
you're overengineering the problem and will possibly drive away contributors.

>   If this project does go forward, I would like to try to have it done by
>the 1.5 release (if it isn't going to happen too soon) and try to get
>O'Reilly to publish (at least part of) it for the release (probably with
>1.5 CDs).

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...).