Date: Fri, 12 May 2000 14:28:23 +0000 From: Nik Clayton <nik@freebsd.org> To: doc@freebsd.org Subject: Including non-DocBook documents in the tree Message-ID: <20000512142823.B1091@kilt.nothing-going-on.org>
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Folks,
I'm wary of doing this, but. . . what are people's thoughts on including
non-DocBook documents in the tree
AS A TEMPORARY MEASURE
(sorry for shouting, but I want to make sure that point comes across).
I'm going through my collection of "e-mail that demanded more attention
than I could pay to it at the time", catching up on things I haven't replied
to yet. This includes some stuff sent to me for the doc project, as well
as stuff sent to to the -doc mailing list. A reasonable chunk of it is
people offering up documentation that they've written (in plain text, or
HTML, or LaTeX), asking what to do with it now.
I think it's fairly clear that the current policy of "let anyone who's
interested in converting it to DocBook do so before we bring it in to the
tree" isn't actually doing a great job of encouraging people to write
documentation. Nor is it leading to a great increase in the amount of
documentation in our tree.
In fact, it's almost certainly turning people away from the project, as
they see their submission sit in the PR bin, or in someone's in-box,
apparently ignored.
This is my fault.
So, how about bringing in non-DocBook documents to the tree. I expect
the majority of these to be HTML. We would put them in the books/ or
articles/ subdirectory as appropriate (depending on whether we think
they are likely to be converted in to a DocBook <book> or <article>),
where they can sit. We'll need a doc.html.mk or equivalent, which can
handle turning the docs in to other formats where possible -- some formats
we might ignore, because it might not be feasible to do it (html2pdf? No
idea if it's a solved problem or not).
As long as doc.html.mk supports the standard targets (install, all, clean,
package...) we can use the docs. And then when someone's looking for
something to do, we can say "Pick one of the docs currently using
doc.html.mk, convert it to DocBook, and commit it".
N
--
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