From owner-freebsd-doc Mon May 15 4:22:22 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-doc@freebsd.org Received: from nothing-going-on.demon.co.uk (nothing-going-on.demon.co.uk [193.237.89.66]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A0F6137B59C for ; Mon, 15 May 2000 04:22:11 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from nik@nothing-going-on.demon.co.uk) Received: from kilt.nothing-going-on.org (kilt.nothing-going-on.org [192.168.1.18]) by nothing-going-on.demon.co.uk (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id LAA82685 for ; Mon, 15 May 2000 11:59:22 +0100 (BST) (envelope-from nik@catkin.nothing-going-on.org) Received: (from nik@localhost) by kilt.nothing-going-on.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) id OAA01157 for doc@freebsd.org; Fri, 12 May 2000 14:28:23 GMT (envelope-from nik@catkin.nothing-going-on.org) Date: Fri, 12 May 2000 14:28:23 +0000 From: Nik Clayton To: doc@freebsd.org Subject: Including non-DocBook documents in the tree Message-ID: <20000512142823.B1091@kilt.nothing-going-on.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0.1i Organization: FreeBSD Project Sender: owner-freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org 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 or
), 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 -- Internet connection, $19.95 a month. Computer, $799.95. Modem, $149.95. Telephone line, $24.95 a month. Software, free. USENET transmission, hundreds if not thousands of dollars. Thinking before posting, priceless. Somethings in life you can't buy. For everything else, there's MasterCard. -- Graham Reed, in the Scary Devil Monastery To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message