Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 19:54:53 +0100 From: Nik Clayton <nik@nothing-going-on.demon.co.uk> To: W Gerald Hicks <wghicks@bellsouth.net> Cc: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Debian Touts Integrated SGML Environment Message-ID: <19990426195453.A75845@catkin.nothing-going-on.org> In-Reply-To: <199904260044.UAA29261@bellsouth.net>; from W Gerald Hicks on Sun, Apr 25, 1999 at 08:44:25PM -0400 References: <199904260044.UAA29261@bellsouth.net>
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On Sun, Apr 25, 1999 at 08:44:25PM -0400, W Gerald Hicks wrote: > At least that's the title of a page on the Debian website, dated Mar 30, 99. Got a URL? > The SGML support for Debian is very similar to the toolset used by FreeBSD. > > Obviously they believe this support to be a feature advantage. Perhaps we > should too? It's practically identical. The main difference is that we don't use a package called SGMLTools yet (http://www.sgmltools.org/). Why don't we? Largely because SGMLTools is two things; 1. A mechanism to ensure that the correct applications are installed on the OS. We have the ports mechanism for that, and in particular, the textproc/docproj port. 2. A series of scripts, written in Python, that hide the command line options to jade(1) and friends, with commands like db2html to convert DocBook to HTML. For the current needs of the FreeBSD Doc. Proj., see doc/share/mk/docproj.docbook.mk. I haven't looked at porting SGMLTools (or at least the (2) part of it) to FreeBSD, mainly because I don't have the time to learn another language (Python). Theres an SGMLTools mailing list, which I subscribe to, sgml-tools@via.ecp.fr. More FreeBSD'ers welcome. If anyone wants to port SGMLTools as well they should go ahead. I don't know how difficult it is to disentangle (1) from (2) above, so it might be tricky to get it working with our ports collection. As a general note; while the db2html scripts and such like might be quite useful to the absolute novice, I don't see the Doc. Proj. using them when converting the DocBook documents to other formats. This is partly because the mechanism we have at the moment works nicely, and follows the BSD tradition. It's also because I don't want to add yet another program (Python) that people need to have installed before they think they can useful contribute documentation. N -- Bagel: The carbohydrate with the hole To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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